Dell Loy Hansen’s next act
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It’s 4 a.m.
At 70 years old, Dell Loy Hansen could be leading a more than comfortable retirement. He built a real estate empire that has fed a mountain of wealth and now also supports dozens of charities and foundations across the state of Utah.
But instead of sleeping — like many other men his age would be this time of day — Hansen is wide awake on a Zoom call at his office, talking with a team on the other side of the world.
He’s getting a status update on the hundreds of homes — literal villages — he and the now Utah-based nonprofit To Ukraine With Love have partnered together to build for hundreds of Ukrainians displaced by war. He does this almost every day. Some days it’s construction updates. Others, it’s crying with a Ukrainian family who just moved into a new home.
Hansen has devoted more than $70 million in donations toward efforts to house homeless Ukrainians. And there’s more coming. It’s a multiyear commitment to not only help Ukraine rebuild even as the war rages on but to give the war-torn country hope for its future.
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“I’m working literally twice as much as I’ve ever worked in my life,” Hansen recently told me, estimating he’s putting in 12- to 14-hour days. “I work on Ukraine from 4 in the morning until 8 in the morning. ... Then I get ready and I go to work after that,” spending the rest of his day as chief executive officer of Wasatch Group, the real estate development company he founded.
The way Hansen sees it, he’s got a “very compressed timeline” in front of him. Statistically, Hansen said he should die when he’s about 83.
“I’ve got 13 years,” he said. “What can I get done? That’s literally how I see it.”
A big part of his plans involves building homes, schools and entire communities in war-torn Ukraine. In October, he flew to the former Soviet republic for a third time for the grand opening of several Ukrainian housing projects — including one named after him, Hansen Village. And that’s just the beginning.
Several more projects with hundreds more homes are in the works, all not possible without Hansen’s donations and development expertise and To Ukraine With Love’s persistent work and in-country connections. The nonprofit contracted with 1,000 Ukrainian construction workers to build the villages.
Call this Hansen’s third act in what’s been a life and career full of ups and downs. The first, building a real estate empire from the ground up. The Wasatch Group claims a portfolio that “spans real estate development, commercial and retail development and management, multifamily development and management, technology, venture capital, and consumer products.” The second, owning Real Salt Lake, Utah’s professional soccer team, and promoting athlete development within the state before selling the pro team amid headline-grabbing controversy.
How did he get here? How did this Utah multibillionaire developer and former professional soccer team owner come to pour so much of his wealth, passion and life into Ukraine?
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I asked to come visit Hansen at his home office. When I arrived at his gated Holladay estate, a dog barked when I knocked on the door. Red, his rust-colored goldendoodle, soon settled as Hansen ushered me through his immaculate, glowing white entryway, a chandelier hanging above. We went straight to his office where a Ukrainian flag hung on the wall and dozens of other Ukrainian mementos line the shelves. We sat at his desk, and he dove right in without missing a beat.
Hansen talked a million words a minute, excitedly pushing photographs of the Ukrainian villages’ progress in front of me and describing each of the projects being built near Kyiv in overwhelming detail. There’s Chudo Village, or “miracle” village in Ukrainian — the country’s first and only senior living community for 162 elderly Ukrainians. An apartment building for 630 Ukrainians from heavily bombed-out cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut. And Hansen Village, expected to eventually house about 1,280 Ukrainians.
He said there are bomb shelters built beneath those villages. He’s not deterred by threats of air raids and destruction, saying the “odds of us being hit are remote.” And his efforts are more than just putting roofs over their heads. It’s about creating jobs, creating community, creating a sense of purpose and, most of all, creating hope, he said.
“I understand that to help stimulate the economy, development dollars are the most important because they ricochet more deeply through a community,” he said. “The more I can do right now will be more important than if I do it later. So I’m not willing to wait.”
As Hansen talked, my eyes kept drifting to a green military jacket framed above his computer monitor. He sits beneath it every day during those 4 a.m. phone calls with his team in Ukraine.
“This was my dad’s,” he told me. Straight out of high school, his father Delbert Loyal Hansen joined the Navy, and that was the same peacoat he wore while he served in Italy in 1944. He kept it for years, later using it to stay warm while doing barn chores at the family home in Smithfield. Hansen said he remembers his dad wearing it every day during the wintertime while he cared for his horses, rabbits, chickens and pigeons.
The peacoat, Hansen said, reminds him of the sense of responsibility his father instilled in him at a young age. It wasn’t just barn chores. As a boy, Hansen said his father taught him and his brother that Saturday mornings were for serving others.
Hansen said they’d wake up at 7 a.m. sharp — “we never had to talk to dad, we knew what we had to do” — to tend to the yards of their five widowed neighbors. Trees trimmed. Yards raked. Trash taken out. They were expected to be done by 11 a.m. so they could take everything to the dump.
“It was all these unspoken responsibilities,” Hansen said. “I never once heard him mention to anyone that he took care of these five widows. Not once. We just knew we did it. ... And I’m always intrigued when people need to be recognized for when they do good.”
Hansen paused for a moment before motioning between us.
“This is not for me,” he said, explaining he was reluctant to sit down with a reporter to discuss his recent endeavors in Ukraine. The Deseret News had been trying for months to interview him, but the last thing he said he wants is for people to think he’s doing it for credit or notoriety.
The real reason, he said, is “I want to look into the eyes of a person that I helped, and we know what we’ve done for each other,” Hansen said. “That’s the only thing I care about.”
But if his story helps inspire other Utahns to help Ukraine, Hansen said that’s why he agreed to the interview.
“I’m worried that Utah doesn’t understand how important it is to help Ukraine as a young democracy that needs our help,” Hansen said.
There’s no shortage of carnage and conflict happening throughout the world, with the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East now capturing the world’s attention. To Hansen, the U.S. also can’t forget that Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, and it’s fighting on the front lines for the rest of the free Western world.
“The war is every bit as intense as it’s ever been right now,” Hansen said after he returned from his October visit to Ukraine. “There are as many people being wounded, villages being destroyed, areas being shelled. ... The need is not lessening, it’s growing.”
From soccer to Ukraine
The last time Hansen made headlines in Utah was over three years ago when he announced he was selling Utah’s men’s and women’s professional soccer teams — Real Salt Lake, Utah Royals FC and the Real Monarchs — in the wake of a scandal involving allegations of racist language and criticism of his players. At the time, Hansen issued a statement expressing remorse and announcing he and his wife agreed “that the best way forward for the Real Salt Lake family is to assume new ownership and a refreshed vision.”
We were on a short stroll with Red in a wooded area near Hansen’s home — where Hansen said he likes to come to take mental breaks throughout the day — when he addressed that time in his life. He said it was a crucial turning point leading to what he’s now doing in Ukraine.
“God humbles us,” he said. “I never would have done this. I would not have done Ukraine if I had stayed at Real. Because it put me on the path to do this. So, a forced change, maybe there’s a bigger purpose. ... Thank heavens I made that change because I was not happy.”
Hansen said he “truly did not enjoy” managing professional athletes. “I loved the youth. I loved the soccer.” But dealing with athletes and agents wasn’t his cup of tea, “so I never would have been the best owner of a pro system.”
Instead, Hansen said he’s more interested in helping people in need, meeting them face-to-face, hugging them, looking into their eyes and finding even more ways to help.
Hansen said a “good share” of the money he’s using now to fund projects in Ukraine came from selling the soccer franchise. He declined to say a specific amount, but he said he’s committed to make a “significant” investment in Ukraine over at least the next three years. Building homes isn’t enough. He wants to also eventually build 10 schools for thousands of Ukrainian students.
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But where does his interest in Ukraine come from?
Hansen told me that ever since he read “Exodus” by Leon Uris in high school, he made a personal vow that if he were ever in a position to help a group suffering from genocide like how the Jews suffered under Hitler, he’d do it. That resolve strengthened in him when he visited the Anne Frank house after he returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Spain.
“I would have gladly sacrificed my life fighting Hitler’s Germany and the extermination of people throughout Europe,” he said.
Hansen calls himself a “Christian stoic.” He said he’s read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius 20 times. The Good Samaritan parable, especially, has been a major guiding force in his life.
“I always swore in my mind if I ever had the circumstance and I was presented with that Good Samaritan challenge of here’s a group like the Jews being persecuted by Hitler, what would I do?” he said.
In his lifetime, Hansen said the U.S. has fought wars of “police actions,” and not wars against “an ideology that was bent on destroying and genocide of a people.” But then, when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, “I knew I had to go,” he said.
“I knew this was the moment I’d thought about my whole life,” Hansen said. “Here’s a people that are being murdered ... being tortured, being annihilated. And for no other reason other than the fact that a large, brutal authoritarian government wanted a land acquisition.”
“I’m too old to carry a machine gun,” Hansen said. “So I thought, ‘What can I do?’”
Where it began
Hansen’s efforts started with a partnership with then Utah County Attorney David Leavitt, seeking 500 Ukrainian families to support financially for a full year. Hansen, his wife Julie, Leavitt, and Leavitt’s wife, Chelom, flew to Poland and went to western Ukraine in May 2022, just months after the invasion broke out and displaced some 6 million Ukrainians.
For more than two years now, Hansen said the Dell Loy Hansen Family Foundation has continued to support those families through the “Dignity Dollars” program, providing them each $200 every month to pay for food, clothing, utilities or other needs.
But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to do more. He said he soon learned that Ukrainian struggles all came down to “three absolute needs: employment, housing and food.” When he heard about a Ukrainian woman who at the time was living in Idaho and had started a nonprofit that was not only opening hot meal centers across Ukraine but also building modular houses for Ukrainians that had lost their homes to bombings, he had to learn more.
That was To Ukraine With Love, founded by Svitlana Miller. He soon discovered that the nonprofit offered an intimate gift to its donors — face-to-face interactions with the families receiving new homes, many of them over Zoom.
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When he reached Miller to talk about their efforts, it was Feb. 15. He was almost a day too late.
Donations were running dry. Miller had just told her modular home warehouse staff that she could no longer pay them and that they were out of work. But when Hansen called her, wanting to know more about their efforts, he urged Miller to call the builders back and tell them they had their jobs back. The next morning Miller woke up to a notification from her bank: a $500,000 deposit from Hansen in To Ukraine With Love’s account.
That was the beginning of what’s grown into a massive undertaking and tight-knit partnership between Hansen and To Ukraine With Love. Hansen pledged to sponsor 20 houses a month, then more. He helped ramp their efforts to over 50 houses a month. So far, through donations from Hansen and others, the nonprofit says it has now gifted over 350 modular homes.
And they haven’t stopped there.
Building villages in Ukraine
Hansen and To Ukraine With Love went on to work together to buy land, apartment buildings and began constructing villages and schools.
In large part thanks to support from the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, Hansen Village went from a blueprint to reality in a matter of six months. It opened last month to its first 315 Ukrainians. It’s expected to eventually house about 1,280 Ukrainians, though its initial phase includes 82 homes for 315 residents. Its second phase will entail 147 homes for 545 residents, and the third phase will include 111 homes for 418 residents, according to To Ukraine With Love.
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When Hansen village first opened on Oct. 21, To Ukraine with Love and Hansen welcomed an initial 80 families from devastated areas including Bakhmut and Mariupol. Among them was Maryana Vartsaba and her three children from Mariupol.
Vartsaba’s husband was serving in the Ukrainian army before he was taken prisoner by the Russians. His family can only hope that he’s still alive but they just don’t know, according to accounts from Hansen and To Ukraine With Love’s staff. Reflecting on that visit to Ukraine, Hansen told me he was especially struck by one of Vartsaba’s children, 10-year-old Bohdan, a little boy who did not smile until Hansen said he started talking to him about soccer.
“His eyes just lit up,” Hansen said, when he recounted telling the boy one of the Ukrainian builders he works with owns a soccer academy. “I said, ‘I can get you on that team,’ and he looked at me like, ‘Really?’”
“Even the saddest little boy we met that day, we had a way to give him hope,” Hansen said.
The nonprofit uses lists of internally displaced people compiled by the Ukrainian government to vet for families in “dire” need, or those who have lost their homes that also have difficulty supporting themselves.
Those villages and apartments will be “transitional,” Hansen said, available to Ukrainians in need rent-free until they’re “healed,” or gain employment so they can be self-sufficient. Currently, Hansen said he and To Ukraine With Love are operating under a five-year plan, with the nonprofit developing and managing the projects and leasing the land and apartments for $1 a year. Long term, Hansen said the land and buildings will be owned and operated by a newly created Ukrainian-based charity called the Hansen Ukrainian Mission, formed under the Dell Loy Hansen Family Foundation.
What will happen after those five years?
“People who live there have already asked if they would be able to buy (the homes) in the future, and we probably would create a mortgage that we would sell to them with cheaper interest and let some of them buy the assets, and then that money would go to the charity for other charitable purposes,” Hansen said. “We may take that money and build additional housing or fund a school. But once the money’s in the charity, it belongs to the charity. It will never belong to me again.”
Even as they continue to build villages and schools, Hansen and To Ukraine With Love are still constructing modular homes. This month, they’re doing a new push called Homes for the Holidays, aiming to build 50 more houses by Christmas. Hansen has pledged to match dollar for dollar up to $500,000 by Nov. 28.
There’s another project called Loraloma near Austin, Texas, that Hansen said will help fundraise for even more Ukrainian homes. “What I said is I can’t build for rich people unless I help poor people,” Hansen said. So he said he and his partner, Becky Buchan, are selling 450 lots for high-end homes (priced at about $1 million to $1.5 million) through a program called Homes for Hope. For every one purchased and built in Texas, it will finance building a home for someone in Ukraine.
Miller and Hansen have cried together while giving homes to Ukrainians, whether it’s by Zoom or in person. Recently, she sent Hansen a tearful video of herself expressing her gratitude for his generosity after they gifted several homes, one to a widow and another to a family that recently lost their son while he was fighting on the front lines. Tears welled in Hansen’s eyes when he played it for me.
“Your ability to feel people’s pain and to let them know how much they’re loved and how much they matter, it’s unmatched,” Miller said in the video. “It’s not just your funds, but it’s how you feel for our people.”
Charitable giving — in both Utah and Ukraine
Hansen declined to say how much he’s worth, but it’s in the multibillion-dollar realm. He’s not on Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List because his company holdings are not publicly traded and harder to trace.
He also declined to state an overall number for charitable giving, but said for 40 years now, his goal has been to contribute 30% of his income to nonprofits and charities.
It has amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars” in charitable giving, his wife Julie Hansen said. “His generosity — particularly in the state of Utah — is unprecedented,” she said.
Ukraine has only been a recent charitable endeavor. In the past, Hansen and his partners have supported dozens of Utah-based efforts. Wasatch Group supports 34 charitable support trusts indefinitely, plus “many more” causes that the Hansen family supports on an as-asked basis, Julie Hansen said. That totaled over $160 million in charitable donations in recent years toward education, health care, arts and other community needs throughout Utah.
Hansen said he knows some “detractors” may balk at his efforts and question why he’s giving so much to Ukraine while there are still needs at home in Utah. “I’m already (supporting dozens of) charitable trusts in Utah. Scholarships, food, abuse, all of that. I have never left here. But that does not mean that I can’t help (Ukraine).”
For Ukraine, Hansen said he and his partners have so far committed a total of about $120 million for housing, food and other programs over a 21⁄2-year period. “We’ve already achieved $70 million of that, and we’ve got $50 million over the next 14 months to invest in Ukraine,” Hansen told me last month.
It hasn’t been easy to come up with the capital for all of those endeavors. “I keep selling things,” Hansen said. “I call a partner up and say, ‘Will you buy 1% of my company,’ and I wire that money straight to Svitlana. We’re constantly tipping over trees.”
There’s one investment — and passion — in particular that Hansen plans to cash out in order to fund a significant portion of future Ukraine donations.
World class coin collection
Hansen took us to his vault.
I agreed not to disclose the location due to security concerns, but it was in an unassuming basement somewhere in Salt Lake City. There — behind a thick steel door with a large, round handle that clicks shut when locked — is Hansen’s multimillion-dollar coin collection.
When Hansen strode into the vault, he immediately began rummaging through the thousands of coins placed carefully in display cases and drawers, pulling out one after another while excitedly describing their year, condition and origin.
“Like a kid in a candy store,” Hansen’s wife, Julie, remarked.
Coin collecting started as a hobby when Hansen was in second grade. In fact, he still has several tattered navy-colored books filled with nickels. Of course they’re not worth much today — especially in comparison with all the other coins that fill the vault — but Hansen hangs onto them for sentimental value.
“I just enjoy the history of it,” he said. “Coin collecting, very simply, is about the hunt and history.”
It was about six years ago that Hansen said he started to get serious about collecting, starting a certified coin company, David Lawrence based in Virginia Beach, with his partner, John Brush, who now works as the company’s president. Now Hansen has claim to one of the best U.S. coin collections. His D.L. Hansen Collection has won multiple “outstanding achievement” awards from the PCGS Set Registry, which currently ranks his collection No. 1 for all-time finest.
In 2018, Hansen, with the assistance of Brush, “reached a huge milestone” in his quest to surpass 20th-century American financier Louis E. Eliasberg’s collection, Coin Week reported. That’s when he bought the Mickley-Hawn-Queller specimen of the 1804 Draped Bust dollar — known as the “King of American Coins” — for $2.64 million.
Hansen also has an impressive array of “ancients.” He pulled out one from Sicily dated 300 B.C., and one from Attica dated 440 B.C. But those aren’t as valuable as the rare $20 gold coins, for which he has two sets, one a set of the finest grading and the other a set of duplicates that are of second-rate grade, which he called his “second set.”
Lining half of the room were hundreds of those $20 gold coins from the California Gold Rush. He estimated there’s about 3,000 coins that make up that “second set” segment of his collection
It has taken him years to build, but now he’s going to cash out that portion of his collection. Over the next 10 months, Hansen said he’s tasked Brush with auctioning off all of those second set $20 gold coins.
Hansen estimates when all of those 3,000 coins sell, they’ll bring in about $40 million to $50 million. Of that, he’s expecting to put about $20 million toward Ukraine projects, most of which will go toward To Ukraine With Love, while the rest will go to other charities supported by Wasatch Group and the Hansen family. Hansen said only a limited number of coins can be auctioned off at a given time, or else “you’ll flood the market.”
Coin collecting has been a fun passion, but it’s also been an investment that “has an ultimate good that will supersede my life,” Hansen said.
After he dies, the rest of the coin collection will move into the Dell Loy Hansen Numismatic Foundation. His daughter, Diana Hansen, who is currently managing the D.L. Hansen Collection, could sell those coins and use the proceeds for charity. “So it’s a long-term charitable thing,” Hansen said.
Given coins can often provide a glimpse into a nation’s history, it’s striking that a major chapter of Ukraine’s history is playing out at this moment in time. That’s not lost on Hansen. Mulling this, he picked up a single coin — a 1901 $10 coin, one he estimated is now worth $12,000.
“I can feed 3,000 people for that coin,” he said. “So when I look at that coin, 3,000 people can come up and get two meals for that coin.”
There’s no question he’s going to great lengths and using significant amounts of his wealth in Ukraine. But to Hansen, at this point in life and at this given time, it’s now or never.
“Every time I see a need in Ukraine, I don’t debate. I just say, ‘Let’s do it.’ And we go do it.”
Tears came to Julie Hansen’s eyes when she spoke to me about her husband’s endeavors with Ukraine and what their family thinks about him spending one of his final life chapters this way. She said he’s always been an “incredible builder,” ever since he started his business in his 20s.
“He’s built many things — buildings, empires, businesses. But one thing he also builds is people,” she said, her voice cracking. “The need to help build these people, to give them hope, was inherent in our service in Ukraine. And that’s what keeps him going every day.”
What the Hansen family is doing “might be a drop in the big realm of things,” she said, “but we believe we’re in a fight not just for Ukraine, but a fight for all of freedom. So we do what we can.”
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