The New York Times
Sunday, March 14, 1993
Apartment House With A Live-In Tutorial
A Builder Helps Poor Children In Los Angeles
By Morris Newman

LOS ANGELES Little is outwardly remarkable about the white stucco apartment building in South Central Los Angeles called EEXCEL Apartments. Yet this modest three-story building has quickly become one of the most widely observed and discussed experiments in both housing and education in recent years.

The $4-million, .46-unit apartment house opened four months ago in the predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood not far from areas ravaged by the civil unrest last spring. Its name is an acronym for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations, and it could be described as a sanctuary for education in an urban setting that offers children few other incentives for learning.

For the last three years, Kent Salveson, a corporate lawyer turned developer, has devoted himself full time to the development of EEXCEL Apartments and its in-house educational program. That program calls for live-in counselors and visiting tutors and sets aside a room in the building for learning.

While more a tutoring operation than a school, the counselors work closely with the children's teachers.

Mr. Salveson is developing at least three additional apartment- buildings based on the program, all in Los Angeles, and he clearly views it as a prototype for similar efforts elsewhere.

One expert who is intrigued by the Los Angeles apartment building is Demetra Nightingale, senior researcher for the Urban Institute, based in Washington. "The Program" she says "is unique because it is attempting to integrate housing and education in a way I haven't seen before and also because a private developer is undertaking the initiative to do this."

Another admirer is Guilbert Hentschke, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Southern California, which supplies students to be tutors and counselors in the program. Teachers, he said, are always trying to find the way to involve households, "but you always get stopped at the front door." "This program," he said, "gets you inside."

A sense of community should be fostered within the apartment house to make education a group project, according to Mr. Salveson. The live-in tutors occupy two apartments. All other households, with one exception, all households are participating in the program. The turnover rate is low: only three families have moved out since the building opened in September, and Mr.Salveson said he could fill the building again with households on a waiting list.

The educational program is reflected in the building's layout. A centralized 1,000 square-foot study area, equipped with computers, can be found in the center, near the laundry and a children's play area. The study room is actually the shell of a three-bedroom apartment that has been left open.

In addition to room and board, each counselor is paid a salary of about $1,000 a month, which is paid out of tenant rents. Rents in the apartments range from $210 for a a one-bedroom to $850 for a three-bedroom.

Perhaps even more unusual, and potentially more controversial, are the monetary incentives that are offered both to individual schoolchildren and to households for sticking with the program. When the children's school grades came out about a month ago for the first time since the program began, Mr. Salveson hosted a party in the building, handing out $15 to children for each A they earned and $10 for each.

One recent visitor who said he was not put off by the money-for-grades incentive is James Hyman, associate director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Washington, which provides grants to programs for disadvantaged children. The foundation has not contributed money to EEXCEL programs, but is considering it.

"Some people may argue that money is not the right way to motivate kids," Mr. Hyman said. "But if you had been in that room and seen the enthusiasm of parents and of the children who were being recognized with applause from adults and other kids, it was clear that money was a secondary issue."

Another monetary incentive that the program offers to tenants is to forgive part of the rent as a reward for participating in the program. The monthly rent statement includes a $140 charge for the educational program, but the charge has been waived as a reward for participation in the program. (Mr. Salveson confessed he had yet to actually collect the fee from any household in the building, but vowed he would insist on evidence of good faith participation after the initial "honeymoon" period had passed.)

Both home building and an evangelical belief in education are relatively new to Mr. Salveson, who formerly was a corporate counsel in the Los Angeles office of Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm, and later was a self-employed mortgage banker. His attitude toward the poor and disadvantaged was not exactly liberal, he recalls.

"My prior view was," he said, "'What's wrong with them? Why can't they do what I've done?' "

His attitude changed abruptly a few years later during a conversation with a tenant from an earlier project, a Hispanic mother of five who worked two jobs to support her family. She told him that she wanted her children "to have more than I did -better education, to do the things I wasn't able to do." Moved by what he said was the realization of self-perpetuating poverty, he soon conceived the EEXCEL project.

If educators are interested in the notion of an apartment building that supports schoolwork, however, lenders have been indifferent, even hostile. Mr. Salveson said that 40 lenders had turned him down. Some were simply not interested in apartment buildings in South Central Los Angeles, where few conventional lenders do business.

"Redlining is alive and well," Mr. Salveson observed.

Other lenders, he reported, were flummoxed by the notion of such an operation in an apartment building, and perturbed by the line item in the budget for counselors' salaries.

Financing eventually came from the Century Freeway Housing Program, a Los Angeles-based public housing fund that has made $12 million available to Mr. Salveson's projects, including half the construction financing for EEXCEL Apartments. The rest came from First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles. Home Savings of America provided the mortgage.

Mr. Salveson said Fredric J. Forster, the Home Savings president, convinced his loan review committee to take a chance on an unusual project.

Mr. Salveson, who had a 10-year career as a mortgage banker and built three apartment buildings with a total of 40 units before the EEXCEL Apartments, said he had been puzzled by the balkiness of lenders toward his project, since the apartment building is meant to be profitable.

Aided by low-interest-rate financing, Mr. Salveson said the apartments could yield up to an 11 percent return.

Maintenance costs are low, he said, because residents tend not to vandalize the building or spray graffiti on the walls. More important, he said, profitability means "nobody can pull the plug on your funding."

For the time being, Mr. Salveson is focused on his next three buildings, all modeled on the EEXCEL program. Whatever his problems in financing the apartment buildings may have been, they do not seem to have shaken his belief in the program.

"I think we should build 50 or 60 of these places, and see what they'll do," he said.

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