Commentary on local issues, viewpoints of residents and community leaders, and letters : Affordable-Housing Projects as Long-Term Investments : KENT SALVESON

Kent Salveson is an Orange County-based developer who is building affordable-housing projects in Los Angeles that include free child care, after-school tutoring, computer instruction, social service referrals and other educational programs. Salveson, of San Juan Capistrano, has been working on Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations, or the EEXCEL program, since 1989. Academy Hall, the first of five EEXCEL buildings to be built in metropolitan Los Angeles, opened last month. He was interviewed by Elston Carr.

A lot of people want to know why I, as a white developer, am building in a black and Latino area. When friends ask me why I do what I do, I say, “Hey, I could tell you about your parents just by the house you live in. You had parents who told you to do this and that, and lo and behold you’re doing pretty well. But you didn’t do it by yourself.”

We benefit from the fundamentals that we obtain from our parents and from our education. And the better those things are, the better we tend to do in life. The vast majority of the population needs some external motivation. People need a lot of intangibles that contribute to their success.

The fundamental difference between my family and other families was really education. It comes down to many things, but I realized that my parents and their education and their background had given me a tremendous advantage that other kids had not been raised with. My father has his doctorate in engineering and master’s in business economics. My mother was also a college graduate. I grew up in Brentwood. My dad always did well.

I practiced law for a couple of years and I didn’t really enjoy doing that, but it still gave me a lot of background and a lot of knowledge. Practicing law was not in my personality. I wanted to take nothing--and create something. I wanted to have a positive impact on the world around me.

When I took the EEXCEL concept to the banks, almost without exception they told me it was too management-intensive. They told me that it was not really needed, that it wouldn’t make a difference. They just blew me off. To get a loan, I finally had to drop the educational part of program. The banks finally said yes, and we began construction. In the hope of restoring the educational part of the program, I went to USC and they loved the idea. As an alumnus with my background, I had a lot of advantages.

We had a lot of problems with the building. We ran into every snag you could imagine. And the biggest problem was that it took the government bureaucracy six months to a year to accomplish what a savings & loan or a bank could do in 30 days.

I’ve taken everything I’ve got financially and put it into this first project to make it work. I’ve got probably about $1.5 million in that building. I’ll make money doing this in the long term. In the short term, I haven’t seen a paycheck in three years. But even if this had meant my personal bankruptcy, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. And frankly, we got very close to that because money has been so slow in coming back in.

I hate to sound so sentimental, but if I’m right about the program, the consequences for the entire nation would outweigh the personal risk to me. I know that may sound corny, but it’s true. Despite whatever financial losses that I might have, I’ll still be able to go back and get other government agencies to lend me money and eventually dig myself out of the hole. What’s become really important to me is proving that this can work. I know it can work. I know I’m right.

If the government said, “Look, EEXCEL raises a whole new concept in terms of affordable housing and henceforth every project we build should have this sort of amenity . . . ,” that could turn around the whole country.

My projects are based on economics--on business decisions. But the consequences to the nation and the consequences to the economy in productivity of individuals . . . you can’t measure it, but I know it’s there. There’s so much waste of human potential that we just cannot continue to overlook it on the scale that we do.

If we want to change a neighborhood, a community, our country, we have to change the home. I don’t care if it’s in Beverly Hills or in South-Central. Children are being neglected. A nation is the sum of all its homes.