Affordable Housing With Built-In Steps to Betterment

They work out of a small San Juan Capistrano office suite amid the trappings of suburban comfort and aesthetic pleasure, but apartment builders Kent Salveson and Dan Hunter have their eyes trained on the urban wastelands of South-Central Los Angeles.

That’s not the direction you normally look to buoy your spirits, but get these two builders talking about their housing plans for the L.A. ghetto and they sound like a couple of gung-ho college kids out on their first jobs and ready to take on the world.

At 41 and 45, respectively, Salveson and Hunter have been around long enough to know that many things are amiss in this world. The thing that distinguishes them from the vast lot of the rest of us is that they’ve decided to try to do something about it.

So when they applied for funds to build apartments for low-income families near the Century Freeway in Los Angeles, they added a twist.

Convinced that a weakening family structure is robbing inner-city kids of their potential, Salveson and Hunter proposed a program under which their tenants would have access to family counselors and academic tutors in their apartment buildings. Through contractual arrangements with prospective tenants, such inducements as rent reductions would be available if the youngsters in a family perform up to certain academic standards. In addition, bonuses like field trips and career-day programs will be offered through the apartment-complex management.

Salveson and Hunter, who joined forces about three years ago, say the apartment-complex manager will be a retired schoolteacher and that they’ve already lined up after-school tutors who will offer remedial instruction for four hours a day and four times a week. The project is being financed through both public and private funds.

Local school principals and academicians at the USC and Pepperdine University have endorsed the program. More importantly, the Century Freeway Housing Program loved it.

This December, Salveson and Hunter say, the first of 350 apartment units will be ready.

“It started out with Dan and I wanting to do something more than just build affordable housing and apartments,” Salveson said. “That’s not the answer for these people. They are very good, very decent, hard-working people. They’re all striving for the American dream; they want the benefits everyone else has in life. What they lack is the education, and even more of what they lack is the parent that has helped them get that education. We all think of ourselves as having done it all by ourselves, but that’s not really true. What we’ve come to understand is that the family and the development of the family, the unity of the family--those are the things that really make people successful or not successful.”

The two formed EEXCEL, an acronym for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations. Confident of success in South-Central Los Angeles, the two say they plan to make such programs their life’s work.

Each grew up in relatively comfortable surroundings. But as they researched the backgrounds of the neighborhoods in Los Angeles, they saw a different picture. They found a dropout rate of over 50%, with 60% of the residents having only an eighth-grade education. In addition, 55% of the homes were run by single parents.

And while understanding that some children succeed against those odds, many don’t. “According to the school principals we talked to, the parents overall just don’t have the capacity to counsel their children properly,” Salveson said. “They know what they want for their children; they don’t know how to tell their children to go out and get it, because they haven’t done it or anything close to it. The problem compounds itself because the children recognize the shortcomings of their parents and so they don’t really respect their parents’ opinions. The parents say you shouldn’t drop out of school, and the kids say, ‘Well, why not? You did.’ ”

Salveson and Hunter both say they’ve never been as excited about a project. The seemingly overwhelming odds against making a dent in the inner-city poverty scene don’t bother them.

“It’s more of a mission for us,” Salveson says. “You’re going to think we’re a little corny, but there’s an element of lost human potential which concerns Dan and me. There are people in South-Central L.A. that are unproductive, undereducated and under-utilized, and that’s appalling to us.”

“The fact is,” Hunter says, “there’s a huge problem out there in the country and the community, and if we don’t attack the problem in different ways, the problem is going to get bigger and bigger. It’s already a crisis for anyone who lives there.”