"Alan I. Casden is a self-made real estate billionaire who lives in Beverly Hills, California. He is an accounting graduate of what is now the Leventhal School of Accounting at the University of Southern California. Mr. Casden enrolled at USC as a sophomore after an academically disappointing freshman year at UCLA. In 2000, he gave $10.6 million to USC to benefit the Institute for Study of Jewish Role in American Life, endow a dean’s chair at the Leventhal School and create the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast within the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.

His former company, Casden Properties was a Los Angeles-based builder of high-density inner-city real estate that was bought by AIMCO in 2004. Casden is a loyal backer of Jewish causes, including Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance."