101 Things You Can Do For Our Children's Future
By Richard Lowe

Page 315 - CREATE SMART HOUSING

One day in 1988, Orange County developer Kent Salveson was talking to a tenant in one of his low-income housing complexes. She was a single mother, had five children, and she worked two jobs, at Von de Kamp's bakery at night and El Pollo Loco during the day. Salveson jokingly asked her, "How do you do it with five kids and two jobs? I have one 3-year-old running me ragged."

The woman answered firmly "I want my kids to have a better education than I did; I want them to participate in the American dream."

For Salveson, this was a life-changing moment. He remembered the long dinner discussions with his highly educated parents. He had been blessed, as a child, with a home environment that served as a kind of educational incubator. "Education happens mainly around the dining room table," says Salveson. "If it doesn't happen there, what chance does a kid have in school?"

For years, Salveson had built typical, one-dimensional warehouse-style low-income housing complexes. But inspired by the talk with his tenant - and with the help of Guilbert Hentschke, Dean of the University of Southern California School of Education - Salveson came up with a plan, for a new kind of low-income housing designed to give children educational guidance similar to that which he enjoyed around the dining room table. The program is called EEXCEL, an acronym for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations. Today, Kent Salveson's smart housing is spreading through Southern California. His first smart-housing development, a forty-six unit apartment house, opened in September 1992 in South Central Los Angeles.

To this day we have not had graffiti in our building, a white, four-story building that offers itself as a writing tablet," he says. At least three more complexes will be built during the next few years in Los Angeles. Salveson is working with municipal officials to finalize plans for similar developments in Oceanside and San Marcos.

Salveson's focus is on services, not architecture. His basic stucco apartment complexes typically include a laundry, a children's play area (some of his complexes offer on-site child care and a centralized study area, equipped with computers and staffed by tutors and counselors. "When the kids get home from school, they head straight for the study center," says Salveson. The counselors, usually students from USC, receive free room and board plus a monthly salary of $ 1,000, paid by tenant rents, which range from $210 to $850. When parents can't make it to a parent-teacher conference, the counselor goes. Schools supply copies of textbooks for the library, so no child ever has the excuse of forgetting or losing a textbook. EXCEL children receive $15 for each A and $ 10 for each B. Parents of children with good grades get rent reductions. "We offer real market incentives, /I says Salveson, who describes himself as a politically conservative Republican

EEXCEL hopes to offer free space for police patrol stations. One complex; will contain a one-acre private park. Children won't have to confront gangs when they play. USC's medical and dental schools offer some rudimentary care to residents. In addition, Los Angeles County Health Services will contribute an on-site health clinic at one of the complexes.

Does EEXCEL's total-immersion approach work? So for, evidence that it does is anecdotal. "We're already seeing significant turnarounds in a number of students. Two principals have reported that our students, whose homework is monitored, come to school so well-prepared that it's creating social pressure on other students to do their homework," he says. USC and the Urban Institute, headquartered in Washington, plan a two year study of EEXCEL's effectiveness. Government agencies and banks take part by offering low-cost loans combined with the rent paid by tenants to barely cover the costs of the program. Still, EEXCEL turns a small profit.

"If I wasn't making a profit, I wouldn't be doing this," he says. "If we don't start developing in a socially responsible way, we'll be developing ourselves out of business as a country."

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