John Fahrenkrog, 65, a Kansas native who left a sales career at a Chicago conveyor belt company in the 1960s to become a real estate developer with an avocation for charitable work in the ski areas and resort towns of the Colorado mountains, died Monday, March 18, in Deckers, Colo. He had recently undergone aortic valve and bypass surgery. “The guy would look at you and you liked him,” said Bernie Rinella, a Chicago attorney and longtime friend. “He was the most upbeat and gregarious person you’d ever want to meet in your life.” Mr. Fahrenkrog was born in Wichita but graduated from high school in Hinsdale and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1959 in business administration from the University of Colorado. He worked in Chicago after graduating, but on a visit to his adopted state of Colorado, he was persuaded by friends to return permanently. After that, he developed and sold investment properties as Snowmass Village was opened in the late 1960s, and soon expanded into commercial real estate development in the nearby mountains and Denver area. In 1975, he worked as a commercial real estate broker with Fuller & Co. but returned to residential sales in 1992 in the remote Denver suburb of Castle Pines Village, where he lived and worked with his wife, Judy. The two had met at a University of Colorado football game in 1969 and married in 1986 after becoming reacquainted at a country club near Denver. Mr. Fahrenkrog was an energetic, religious man, and in 1972 he started the Warren Village development in Denver for single-parent families trying to get back on their feet. To do it, he raised millions of dollars from the private sector and established a successful assisted-living facility with a day-care center and Head Start program. The concept was used as a model by Jack Kemp when Kemp was secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush administration. The pair struck up a friendship over the years based on skiing, Republican politics, real estate and family, Kemp said. “He was a very devoted real estate person, and took to heart the biblical injunction that to whom much is given, much is required,” Kemp said. Mr. Fahrenkrog’s wife said that throughout his life, her husband kept a busy schedule of work, volunteering and board memberships. He was a big supporter of the Promise Keepers movement, University of Colorado football and his friends, she said. “He was an only child, and so he just adored his friends,” his wife said. “He made his friends his siblings.” In addition to his wife and friends, Mr. Fahrenkrog is survived by two daughters, Joy and April. A service has been held, though a tribute to Mr. Fahrenkrog will be held July 17 in Denver to raise money for Warren Village.
