Family Life Magazine
Family Matters
Kent Salveson's Excellent Adventure
By Jesse Kornbluth

This was no ordinary ribbon-cutting. The men serving refreshments wore shirts with an unusual designer logo - L.A. COUNTY JAIL. Pete Wilson, California's governor, was on hand to say that he for one, didn't see a Blade Runner future for the city. There were drill teams and school choirs, police on horseback handing out trading cards glamorizing police on horseback and a line of TV cameras recording, all of it. Why all the fuss for a refurbished youth center? Because Los Angeles was marking first anniversary of the burning-and-looting spree that followed the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King - and in South Central, in April 1993, the city was looking for something to celebrate.

As welcome as a youth center will be, a more exciting reason to be hopeful for South Central's future was directly across the street. EEXCEL - an acronym for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations - is the first apartment complex in the United States in which the owner pays the children who live there for academic achievement and guarantees scholarships to the nearby University of Southern California (U.S.C.) to resident teenagers who qualify for admission. This committed approach pays off: low turnover and no graffiti in the building, better grades for resident children, and an unquantifiable measure of hope in an area where noble words have rarely been followed by good deeds

EEXCEL's success has, thus far, excited educators, parents, some Los Angeles bankers and a handful of journalists. It deserves wider attention. Because the EEXCEL approach to breaking the cycle of poverty and ignorance doesn't become invalid at the border of South Central, this model would make sense in any troubled community where children have more incentives to sell drugs and join gangs than to struggle with homework and live clean.

Of the many surprises in South Central, the first and biggest is that it looks more like a middle-class suburban community than an urban slum. The houses are near and, at least on the outside, well kept. You can, in the better areas, hear children splashing in pools. However wrong it is to think so, an observer might well ask, "What's holding these people back?"

That's exactly the attitude Kent Salveson, 44, had when he began to buy real estate in violent, unfashionable Los Angeles neighborhoods. Salveson had grown up in Brentwood, a pricey west side community where wrong doing tends to consist of adultery or fraud. After graduation from U.S.C. with a degree in chemistry, he became a lawyer, then a mortgage banker; he had funded $650 million in loans over the past 11 years. Now he and his smart, supportive wife and their young son and daughter live in San Juan Capistrano, a socially correct coastal suburban house an hour from the Los Angeles sprawl.

Salveson is tall and lean, with a pleasant smile and a way of wearing a Ralph Lauren label that doesn't make a statement. If he doesn't look like a man who has spent much time thinking about housing in poor neighborhoods, there's a reason. "There's not a lot of emotion in mortgage banking," he notes wryly. Until the catalytic moment that led him to invent EEXCEL, in fact, this mortgage banker's attitude toward the poor couldn't have been simpler: "If I can, they can."

But Salveson had decided to do one real estate deal for himself each year, and so he came, by necessity, to meet the residents of the scrubby neighborhood around Dodger Stadium, where he and a partner had bought an apartment building that was in need of renovation. As they worked on its rehabilitation, they, came to savor one daily ritual, lunch at a nearby El Pollo Loco. In the process, they came to know the cashier. And, soon enough, she became their tenant.

This woman had five children, two jobs and no husband, and yet she persevered; with two children, a solid marriage and equity everywhere he looked, Salveson felt stretched to the limit. One day, he had to ask her: What sustains you? "I want my children to have a better education and more opportunities, she said. That reply humbled Salveson. What's the difference between us? What got me where I am?" he asked himself. "And it was so clear: Education. Your value is what you have learned."

Salveson already had his next 1 building on the drawing board, a 46-unit apartment in South Central. He had designed it for maximum profit; now, though, he had more on his mind thin gain. In his post-epiphany clarity, he wanted as his tenants the most misunderstood population of the inner city, good people with dreams." And he knew what he wanted to provide for them: on-site educational facilities. "If you don't change Families, you can't change communities, he reasoned. "It all comes down to: 'Education starts at home."

Salveson devised a plan for a tutoring center, resident tutors and incentives for academic achievement. He presented his scheme to Guilbert Hentschke, dean of the School of Education at U.S.C., which also happens to be located near South Cenrtal. "In education, our whole world is what you do from eight until two, so it took a couple of meetings for me to get it, Hentschke recalls. "Then it hit me. If I were going to pick one silver bullet for inner-city education, here it is: It has enormous potential for schools, and we don't have to do a thing in the classroom to make it happen. This program acts as you wish your parents had acted Mom waiting., for you after school with milk and cookies, and she also knows MS-DOS.

Two apartments disappeared from the architect's Plans, only to reappear as free housing for the U.S.C. Doctoral candidates who Would be the building's resident tutors. Salveson erased the walls of a three-bedroom unit so students could be tutored in a large open space. Then he shared his plans with neighborhood school principal, who were delighted with the aspirations of the first developer they'd ever met. Only, then did Salveson go to see bankers.

"I redlined and maligned" he says. "I was rejected by 40 banks." But the building of a freeway through South Central had, years ago, spurred lawsuits that led to a state-financed effort to replace bulldozed homes and lost jobs; attracted by an ad for loans at 3 percent, Salveson called on Allan Kingston, director of the Century Freeway Housing Program. And Kingston liked the idea. With some $4 million in hand from Century Freeway and Pacific National Bank - topped off by every dollar he'd saved - Salveson went into high -gear.

In September 1992, EEXCEL was ready for occupancy. What potential renters found was a building very much in the European model: a structure that presented a blank face to the street. There was only one entrance, and it led to a courtyard that was almost completely devoted to a playground. The financial incentives were just as complete: $15 for each A, $10 for each B and, down the line, those scholarships to U.S.C. And to be sure that students achieved their parents' dreams, there was required tutoring, four days a week.

Tutoring has strengths that go beyond individual attention. In many inner-city schools, kids who bring books home are called nerds by their classmates; here, all the books are waiting, in the tutoring center. Parents also benefit - like the woman who confided that she had to write a resume but didn't know how. The tutor helped her, and she got the job.

Parents have embraced the services Salveson provides. "Tasha, my six-year-old, wasn't going at First," says Patrice Smith. "Her spelling grades went down, so I got her there everyday. One night I forgot, but she reminded me, 'I have to go work on my spelling'. Now she gets 100s every day." Another resident, who was raised in housing projects, sees the real importance of EEXCEL in its break from the past: "The way my mother brought me up, that wouldn't work for me. We have to say, 'No more. 'So I stay on my 10 year-old. I say, 'You gotta read.' I review his report cards. We can't do it all, but we can do some."

"Some" is probably a fair assessment of EEXCEL's achievements in its first year. The two resident tutors soon became one, and 27-year-old Julie Barber, whose Georgia twang seemed wildly out of place, found herself working with students right up to their bedtime. Barber decided that paying students for good grades in core subjects - which saw $1,700 coming into the hands of some very happy EEXCEL children - wasn't very effective. Now tutors reward effort and participation with gold stars, and at the end of each semester, students attend a banquet and are presented with $20 gift certificate to bookstores. Barber also came to feel that living so close to the families made enforcing the rules of the program difficult, so she moved out.

On the management side, Salveson realized that his early plan to reduce parents' rent if their children did better in school was unwieldy to administer and unfair to the kids; rents are now uniform.

Although our rents are below marker, we haven't had any broken windows or graffiti," he notes. "Tenants are month-to-month, and yet turnover is low. Our biggest expense used to be cleaning the playground - when you have 80 kids in a 46-unit building, it gets trashed up. Now kids keep die play area clean. That tells me we're doing the right thing."

The right thing" changes over time, Salveson has learned. The current focus is one-to-one tutoring. Each child meets with a tutor once a week for two hours. "There's still a general, self-directed study hall, with tutors present, but we're now evaluating kids and finding their level," he says.

Enthusiasm is still strong at EEXCEL. So is human nature. "One Friday, I opened the room so kids could read and I invited parents to join us so their kids could read to them," Julie Barber recalls. "One mother was on the phone and didn't come, so her son left and played Nintendo. That's what you're up against - parents who abdicate and kids who get the message that we don't really value education. But how can you expect kids who see shootings and stabbings and watch MTV to sit in a classroom and be excited by a paper and pencil? There are things we must do better to counteract all that. And in the next building, no tenant should be on welfare and inactive - if they get assistance, they must work"

The next building? Five more EEXCEL complexes are slated to be built in this neighborhood as soon as funding clears. Salveson has bought a 270-unit building in Cleveland, Ohio, and converted it to the EEXCEL model; he's managing another complex there and contemplating a third.

This expansion may be gratifying to residents but it takes a certain roll on Salveson and his family. "It's an hour-and-twenty minute drive from my house to EEXCEL," he notes. 'To beat the traffic, I do 7 am meetings. And I use my car as my place of business. What I spend on my car phone is what I'd spend on an office." But it's just like Kent Salveson to look at the bright side. "By the end of this year," he says, repeating a promise he made to himself a year ago, "I'll get to spend more time with my family."

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