Chicago Tribune
Sunday, November 29,1992
ReaI Estate - This Landlord Provides More Than Apartment
By J. Linn Allen

LOS ANGELES-You've heard of a month's free rent or maybe a cheap parking space as come-ons for apartment rentals. Bet you haven't heard this one, though: Move in and get a four year scholarship for your son or daughter.

That's one inducement offered by the EEXCEL Apartments in South Central Los Angeles, the sprawling area of blight and poverty that erupted in the nation's costliest riot in history last spring.

The 46-unit apartment building is the project of Kent Salveson, a former practicing attorney and mortgage banker in the posh suburb of San Juan Capistrano who is making it his mission not only to build affordable housing in overcrowded South Central but also to change the lives of the residents.

Salveson, now a full-time developer who has built conventional apartment buildings and a shopping center, took a look beyond bricks and mortar in his inner-city building. "I looked at how people lived and saw that the major element missing is education ' " Salveson said.

Many families in the area, which is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, are headed by women who have only 6th- to 8th-grade education, and are often too exhausted after returning from working all day to monitor their children's schoolwork or take them to special classes, Salveson said.

So Salveson, 42, came up with the idea for the EEXCEL (Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations) Apartments, which provides an intensive program of guidance and incentives to push children of resident families to do well in school. His slogan for the project, which he is operating as a profit-making venture, is "from poverty to productivity."

Key to the-program are two live-in counselors, both graduate students in education or psychology from the University of Southern California. I who in return for a break on rent give help with family or school problems. They also help run a study hall staffed by volunteer tutors from USC that students are required to come to four days a week after school to do their homework.

The children are rewarded for A's and B's on tests with $5 and $3 prizes and for an A in a course with $25. An A average for a semester brings two tickets to Disneyland. Older children will be able to participate in a career development program in which they are taken to meet officials of area companies.

Other forms of social support art: provided as well. The dental school at USC will offer teeth checkups and Los Angeles County may have someone come in to do routine medical examinations, Salveson said.

The kicker, of course, is the scholarship program. By arrangement with USC, every child who graduates from high school while living in the apartment building and meets minimum admission requirements will get a four-year all-inclusive scholarship, Salveson said' (At present rates, that would mean a $16,000 tuition and $6,200 in average room and board just for one year.) "We'll be helping to produce competent and capable high school students," Salveson said.

Families are screened with extensive interviews before being allowed to rent in the building, and parents are required to sign an educational contract saying they will take an interest in their children's studies, contribute one day a month to helping in the study hall and attend PTA meetings.

The children sign a contract saving they will respect their parents and teachers, do their homework and not skip school.

The building manager gets copies of students' report cards, attendance and disciplinary records before families are allowed in, and liaison is maintained with the schools to monitor progress. "The contract is not terribly enforceable," Salveson said. But he noted that since EEXCEL, of which he is president, owns the building, he could evict anyone who is disruptive to the program on a 30-day notice.

Some 250 families applied for units in the building when it opened this summer, and it is virtually full. About 40 of the 75 children in the building are of school age and in the educational program, Salveson said.

The rents are all indirectly subsidized, going from $210 for a few: one-bedroom units to $725 for some two-bedrooms. With the help of volunteer time and donated equipment such as computers for the study room, educational program costs run about S 1,000 annually per unit, he said.

With all the extra services, Salveson, who is planning several similar Projects in the area, still expects to make a profit. Total building cost ran about $4 million, more than half of which came from a 3 percent loan from a publicly funded housing program that made the low rents possible.

The city of Los Angeles has responded enthusiastically to Salveson's venture. Gary Squier, general manager of the city's Department of Housing, said it's a model for impoverished areas where the need for decent accommodations can't be considered apart from other social issues. "If you're going to have 100 percent affordable housing, you've got to have a service component," he said.

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