King Harris

King Harris is a Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Planning Council and currently serves as Chairman of the Illinois Housing Development Authority. He is a Trustee of the University of Chicago and chairs the Harris Council of the University’s Graduate School for Public Policy Studies.

He is Chairman of Harris Holdings, Inc., his family investment company and President of the Harris Family Foundation. He serves as Non-Executive Chairman of AptarGroup, Inc. a $2.5 billion NYSE-listed international packaging company. He also is Vice-Chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a Board member of the Rehabilitation Institute Foundation and World Sport Chicago.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1965 and spent two years in the Peace Corps as a community development worker in Lota, Chile. He subsequently received a MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1969 and then became a neighborhood center director for the Office of Economic Opportunity in Revere and Malden, Massachusetts.

In 1971 he joined Pittway Corporation at its burglar alarm division in New York before coming to the Chicago area in 1975 to join its smoke detector business. In 1984 Mr. Harris became President of Pittway and in 1987 President & CEO. In February of 2000 Pittway was sold to Honeywell International.