Gerard van Bortel was born on November 8 1963 in Breda. He followed a rather long but ‘scenic’ educational route. After finishing his general secondary education (MAVO) in Breda, he followed a vocational technical study Architecture in the same city. During that study, he became inspired by affordable housing and urban regeneration, and followed the specialized Social Housing track at the Tilburg Polytechnic Architecture department (HTS). He attained his title as Architectural Engineer (Ing.) in 1989 with a study on the regeneration of a deprived housing estate in the city of Groningen.

Parallel to his career in housing, Gerard continued studying in part-time. After attaining his propedeuse in Economics at the University of Amsterdam, he studied Organisational Sciences (‘Bedrijfswetenschappen’) at the Open University. In 2003 he attained his Masters title with a thesis exploring the link between the organisational strategies and performance of Dutch housing associations.

After completing his alternative military service, he started
working for housing associations in Zwolle (SAVO, later DeltaWonen, from 1989 - 1997) and Groningen (De Huismeesters, from 1997 - 2004) in various functions: housing officer, ICT-officer, quality manager, manager of a Research and Development  department and, finally, senior strategy consultant.

In 2004, Gerard quit his job at housing association De Huismeesters in Groningen, and moved with his wife (Neeltje Reijnders) and two young children to Belgium were Neeltje became a Minister in Brussels for the United Protestant Church of Belgium. It proved to be a pivotal year. Without employment, Gerard started to look for new opportunities in the domain of social housing. This exploration led to a career shift with to a stronger focus on consultancy, research, training and education. He became a social housing strategy consultant working for the Amsterdam-based firm RIGO Research en Advies. Parallel to his work for RIGO, Gerard conducted a study on governance networks in neighbourhood regeneration in The Hague working as an independent researcher for the OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment, part of the Delft University of Technology.

Working for OTB Gerard’s ideas to do a PhD matured. He started his PhD in 2005 under supervision of Prof. Dr. Ir. Marja Elsinga, Prof. Dr. Peter Boelhouwer (both TU Delft) and Prof. David Mullins. In 2007 Gerard left RIGO and started working at OTB, where he specialised in studies on social housing management, finance, governance and institutions. In 2013 Gerard moved to the TU Delft Management in the Built Environment department, part of the Architecture faculty, to strengthen the balance between governance & management and research & education in his work.