8 Over 80: Cliff Cohn

These prominent golden-agers talk about lifelong achievements, what they learned through the years, what they are planning on next and how living longer is a rewarding daily adventure.

Written by David Hodes
Interviewed by David M. Block, David Hodes and Pete Mundo

Cliff Cohn

Birth date: August 21, 1938, Age: 86

“The most dependable people of the hundreds we hired over the years came from a farm. Talk about discipline. Talk about work ethic. I mean, wow.”

Cliff Cohn is chairman of one of the legendary real estate development companies in Kansas City. The story of his company, Yarco Property Management, follows the familiar pathway of other father-to-son success stories from the early 20th century. But there has always been a strong sense of community throughout the company’s history instilled by its founders from the outset.

Yarco began with two relatives joining forces. Cohn’s father, Harry, was a principled, old-school, early 20th century entrepreneur determined to provide a living for his family. He and his brother-in-law, Norman Yarmo, invented Yarco in 1923 by combining the first letters of their last names. 

Today, Yarco is run by the second and third generation of the Cohn family: Cliff, who started at Yarco in the 1960s and is now chairman, and his son Jonathan, who joined the firm in 1990 and became president and CEO in 2005.

Work Ethic

“Part of how each of us grows starts at a very young age and has a lot to do with what we see as we grow up,” Cohn says, reminiscing about watching how his dad worked. “I think it speaks to a lot of how we live our life. The generation that I see today, the newcomer young people coming up, seem to have a different work ethic.”

Cohn’s father was “rocking and rolling” in the early part of the last century when he owned a lot of real estate properties. Then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit. “Everything was mortgaged up to the hilt,” Cohn says. “So I asked him, ‘How did you have the wherewithal to pick yourself up off your butt and put it all back together again?’ He said: ‘Well, it wasn’t that big a deal. You knew what you knew. You knew how to do what you knew how to do. So you dealt with that by figuring out a way to put it to good use.’ He took advantage of the tools that he had. And this from a guy that was kicked out of school in the seventh or eighth grade because he threw an eraser at the teacher.”

That example of his dad’s level of discipline and commitment to responsibility rubbed off on Cohn as he learned his own lessons about hard work while in high school working for his dad’s plumbing company. One summer he was a plumber’s helper, toting heavy parts up and down four-story buildings. It was tough work. “I weighed 100 pounds then and couldn’t hardly carry and waddle up the steps with the right part,” he says. But he learned the discipline of just doing the job.

Starting Up

Cohn went to Southwest High School in KC, then the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated in 1960. He married his sweetheart, Pennie, the day after college graduation. “Sometimes I don’t introduce her as my wife,” he says. “I introduce her as my girlfriend.”

He should have then gone to law school, he says. “Not that I wanted to practice law, but I wanted the discipline that I see in the attorneys I have had the pleasure of dealing with. That was one of my regrets. But I also wanted to get involved in the real estate business because that’s what I grew up with.” 

He started at Yarco right out of college and was given management responsibilities for the iconic Blue Building on 333 W. Meyer Blvd. in the Brookside area of Kansas City in 1961. “I spent three years of my life in that big blue building,” Cohn says. “Even today, more than 60 years later, I think I know more about that building than anyone on the face of the earth.”

Then, in 1982, Cohn’s 78-year-old dad passed away. Suddenly, it was up to Cohn to keep things in his dad’s real estate business rolling along, working with his cousin, Bud Yarmo, son of Norman. “Bud and I just clicked,” Cohn says. “Maybe more importantly, our wives clicked. That’s the key to success.” 

They built the business together until 1990, when Bud died. “It was just ‘boom.’ His death came all at once. So then I was on my own in 1990.”

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Yarco thrived under the leadership of Cohn and his son, Jonathan, growing over the years into a full-service multi-family real estate firm, with 10,000 apartment homes and 100,000 square feet of commercial space across nine states, mostly in Florida, Kansas and Missouri. The Yarco Companies partner and client list includes the Missouri Housing Development Commission, Travelers Insurance, the United States District Court of Western Missouri, the federal Bankruptcy Court, SunAmerica Affordable Housing Partners, UMB Trust and others.

The Human Benefit

One of the major activities today is the company’s work in developing and managing low- to moderate-income housing for families and the elderly. “It became obvious early on that we have lots of residents in our housing that are living below the poverty level,” Cohn says. “It’s a challenge on the landlord side because there are lots of children in many cases. How do you manage that?” 

The children would damage the apartments, causing him to spend $10,000 in some cases just to clean up the property. And that got him thinking: “If we have these extra options in connection with where they lived, and not just a roof over their heads but a place for the kids to do something positive with their time, that would be an advantage. People would want to live there. So I did that. I ended up spending more than $10,000 on a program, but the net result was the human benefit that resulted.”

His “extra options” effort morphed into a not-for-profit program 25 years ago—the Phoenix Family Housing Corporation, which provides not just family housing but sustainable social services to at-risk residents. One of the goals of Phoenix is to provide children with school and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Relationships

Yarco is also developing the last phase of the 24-acre St. Michael’s Veterans Center to create permanent housing for homeless vets. 

Cohn sees beyond the practicality of simply having a home. “There’s a great amount of healing in having a home,” he says. “A home is where I have all my stuff. All my secrets. All my goodies. This is where I can cry. I can laugh. I can close out the world if I want to, or I can open up the world. But this is my castle.” When he has been there to witness a homeless vet step into a fully furnished apartment, “the tears just flow” as the healing begins, Cohn says.

Cohn calls the Phoenix Family his greatest achievement. But he is quick to qualify what that means. “It’s like when you go to the Kauffman Center and the orchestra is there,” he says. “They’re all spread out, and the maestro comes out, and everyone claps, and he bows. They do their wonderful presentation, and the audience applauds. It wasn’t the maestro that made the music. It was all those folks back there. Same thing here. I’m not on the ground dealing with these elderly ladies solving the problems or with these kids solving their problems, teaching them how to read or feeding them because there’s no food at home. I’m not doing that. I’m providing the place for it to take place.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships,” he says. “It’s all about people. I like the social intercourse. I like the interplay.”

His advice for a long and healthy life? “Take care of yourself. You can’t reach out to others unless you take care of yourself first. You’ve got to be prepared to do that. Be honest with yourself, your colleagues and your customers.”  

“At the end of the day, it’s all about relation-ships. It’s all about people. I like the social intercourse. I like the interplay.”

“There’s a great amount of healing in having a home.”

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