Rain Poems

All fall it has seemed to rain here in Dallas. Usually October is the most glorious month of the year. The days are pleasant; the nights begin to be crisp; the trees turn golden; and it’s impossible to stay indoors. This fall in contrast has been muddy and wet and unpleasant. A better time to stay inside and think about the rain than confront it—especially if you’re in the final stages of a big construction project and need some sunny weather to finish the outside work.

So I thought I’d comfort myself, and those of you sharing the weather here in Seattle South (although actually the weather in Seattle when I was there in September was better than what we’ve had) with a few rain poems this weekend. I hope the weather turns bright and sunny so the rainy days are just a memory, but if not, here are a few poems to read.

First is a poem by the brilliant (but gloomy) English novelist Thomas Hardy. Hardy lived and wrote in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the Twentieth Century. In his last years he turned to poetry, which is generally underappreciated.

The following poem turns the observation of English country life into a mediation on life’s meaning and ending, and reminds me of the fact that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike.

An Autumn Rain-Scene
by Thomas Hardy

There trudges one to a merry-making
With sturdy swing,
On whom the rain comes down.

And another knows nought of its chilling fall
Upon him at all,
On whom the rain comes down.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born a decade after Thomas Hardy in 1850, but died at half of Hardy’s age—forty-four as opposed to eighty-eight. A novelist like Hardy best known for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, we usually think of him now as an author for children or young adults. That’s probably a disservice to his memory.

Stevenson’s poetry seems to come from an earlier century and is rarely read seriously now. The following poem ends much like Hardy’s, but at least in Stevenson’s work there is sun and joy after the rain and before death.

When The Sun Come After Rain
by Robert Louis Stevenson

WHEN the sun comes after rain
And the bird is in the blue,
The girls go down the lane
Two by two.

And when life draws to its even
And the day of man is past,
They shall all go home to heaven,
Home at last.

That’s enough melancholy English poetry for one day. Tomorrow we’ll look at a couple of American poems on rain.

A Big Thank You

Nothing is much better than showing up to the office and having nice people come by and bring us money! Marquette Financial Services has been an annual grant maker to Central Dallas CDC since 2007.

Fundraising can be difficult, but it comes with such great rewards. It is wonderful to meet people from companies and organizations within our community who understand our work and have a heart for improving our neighborhoods and strengthening our social bonds with one another.

Thanks to all of you who share your time, your energy, and your money with us!

Pictured from left to right: Paula Caldwell, Marquette Financial; Laura McIntosh, Marquette Financial; Lori Beth Lemmon, Central Dallas CDC

What Was I Thinking?

I was walking the units at CityWalk yesterday, and I went into a studio unit on the west side of the building that I hadn’t been in for a couple of weeks. During the time since I had last been in the unit, a lot of work had been completed, including putting the covers on all the electrical outlets.

I started counting the number of outlets, and then taking pictures of the outlets—perhaps the least inspiring example of photojournalism of all time.

There were four outlets above the kitchen counter; five more in the walls of the living room; only one, thankfully, in the bathroom; and then six more in the bedroom area. In all, there were 16 electrical outlets in a 400 sq. ft. studio apartment.

That seemed excessive to me, so I checked a couple of other apartments and they all had a more reasonable number of electrical outlets—or at least what seemed to me more reasonable, maybe a dozen in a unit.

I am sure that I approved everything in the design of the unit, including the number of electrical outlets. When Rob Colburn at WKMC Architects and I were working through the final unit designs we vetted every detail until we were satisfied that we’d done everything we could do to make the unit the best it could be. Perhaps, on paper the number of outlets didn’t look so great. Maybe I suggested to Rob that we needed an outlet here for a television, there for a lamp and a clock radio—and then two more on the opposite side in case the resident decided to put their bed facing the opposite direction.

I don’t remember anymore why we decided to put the number of electrical outlets in the unit that we did. I am sure we had a good unit—or at least a reason that seemed good to us at the time.

At least, for once, the resident should never find himself or herself short on electrical outlets, and should never need an extension cord. I just wish I could remember what I was thinking when I made that decision.

An Elegant Solution

Sometimes new ways of thinking lead to a better solution to a problem. One new elegant solution helped lead to another for us yesterday. My good friend Jeremy Gregg is executive director of a new nonprofit, Executives in Action (http://www.executivesinaction.org/).

Executives in Action was organized to turn unemployed executives into an asset for the community. Here’s some of the material from its Web site:

Mission



Executives in Action (EIA) engages transitioning senior executives in short-term, high-yield consulting projects with nonprofit organizations, advancing EIA executives as they seek long-term employment in the business sector.



Vision



EIA transforms unemployment from a time of uncertainty to a period of great opportunity for personal and community renewal.



Executives



EIA works exclusively with highly skilled and seasoned business professionals who are transitioning between full-time jobs – with a focus on C-level executives with 15+ years of management experience.



Nonprofit Partners



EIA appoints executives to high-caliber nonprofit organizations that have been thoroughly vetted by EIA staff. These nonprofits have a demonstrated capacity to provide executives with high-yield service projects and the support that they need to deliver meaningful results.

The idea is elegant. It turns a problem into an asset.

We currently have an architect, Frank Richardson, working with us through the program and he’s proved invaluable in helping us complete the CityWalk development. Yesterday Frank found an elegant solution to a problem that had been perplexing us for weeks—how to organize the mailboxes. It is one of those problems that should be simple, but isn’t.

The post office requires that mailboxes be in sequential order—no skipping numbers and no out of order numbers. Another rule under the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that mailboxes for handicapped units (now called UFAS—Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards) be reachable from a wheelchair.

The way our units are laid out with 13 units on the fourth floor, 16 units on the fifth floor and 19 units on floors six through 14, with one UFAS unit per floor, seemed to make this impossible. No matter how we rearranged the mailboxes we either had the mailbox for one of the UFAS units out of reach of a wheelchair or we had to disturb the numerical order. We aren’t allowed to do either of these two things.

There was another less crucial problem as well. Different styles of units ended up with different numbers on the fourth and fifth floor than they had elsewhere in the building. For example, on every floor from six to 14, units ending in “19” are large two bedroom units (619, 719, 819, etc.). But on the fourth and fifth floors those units were number 413 and 516, respectively. That’s confusing.

Frank solved all these problems by making a leap of imagination and realizing that we could have mailboxes without units. If we just go ahead and assign 19 mailboxes to every floor, ignoring the fact that the fourth and fifth floor don’t have that many units, then everything works.

The mailboxes all line up with the UFAS units within reach and with everything in numerical order. The ADA is satisfied and the post office is happy. We just have nine extra mailboxes that don’t get any mail, and we may even be able to assign those mailboxes to our management company or someone else in the building that needs another mailbox. The post office only cares that the mailboxes are in order, not whether anybody ever gets any mail.

None of us could see that we could have mailboxes without corresponding units, no matter how long we worked on the problem. Frank saw an elegant solution—which is only fitting for an Executive in Action.

Affordable Housing and Corruption at City Hall, Part II

If you’re trying to make money, then, as I pointed out yesterday, you need cheap land and you need volume. Most of the time, land is going to be cheaper in the poorer parts of Dallas. There is also less opposition to affordable housing in low income areas (remember here that I’m talking affordable housing, not permanent supportive housing for homeless people). That’s because it is often as nice or nicer than anything else in the immediate neighborhood. So in order to make money as an affordable housing developer, you are going to work in the poorer areas of the city, and they are overwhelmingly minority.

But you also need volume. “One offs” like CityWalk are expensive. You’re doing everything for the first time.

It’s much easier and faster to do the same thing over and over again—as Henry Ford taught us all. So a successful for-profit affordable housing developer builds as close to the same thing every time as is possible.

A successful for-profit tax credit developer also builds the projects themselves (like Brian and Cheryl Potashnik, pictured in the window of one of their projects, did). The reason for building the project yourself is pretty straightforward. You can get eleven percent of the cost of the project (6% for overhead and a 5% profit) for doing so. This is important because the profit on a tax credit deal is otherwise very marginal. There is the potential for a large profit way down the road, usually 30 or 40 years, when the rent limitations expire, but until then the margins are razor thin.

Building the projects yourself, in the same way every time, also mean that you get good at it. The same architects draw almost the same plans, which are then executed by your construction company using the same subcontractors and the same materials. This is the way subdivision builders make money; the way any mass real estate developer can keep prices down and still make money. It’s efficient.

There is a special problem with applying this method to tax credit projects. Even market-rate mass developers have a problem dealing with the vagaries of the market. In order to keep your construction team together, you have to keep it working. That means a constant stream of new projects. For a for-profit tax credit builder, that means winning awards of tax credits every year.

Tax credits are awarded on a competitive basis and a good for-profit builder should be able to win tax credit awards on a regular basis, if the builder has the support of the local community and political leaders. But that’s a big “if”. The consequences of failure are immense.

A for-profit tax credit developer may be going along building three projects per year for a long time, but then if an important political figure turns against the builder, that builder could be out of business in a single year. Without something to build, you have to let your construction people go. Once you let your team disperse, then you have lost your competitive advantage—that means no future awards and you are out of business.

Getting an award every year means making the political leaders happy, and when the choice is making the politicians happy or going out of business, the pressure to cross legal and ethical lines to do so is immense.

So, in short, the whole system is structured to encourage volume building in low income neighborhoods, which are often led by political leaders with limited means but the ability to put a developer out of business just by withholding their support. That’s a situation perfectly structured to encourage improper activity.

Affordable Housing and Corruption at City Hall, Part I

Dallas attorney and former city councilperson Don Hill was convicted last week on seven criminal counts related to the approval of affordable housing projects in the City of Dallas.

The whole episode has been a sordid one for the City of Dallas and, particularly, for the affordable housing industry. For two years after the investigation started, almost no significant affordable housing projects went forward, and it was only this year that the industry got back to normal. Brian Potashnik, who was probably the preeminent developer of affordable housing in Dallas pled guilty to bribing Don Hill, and is also likely to face a prison term.

The entire episode probably says a lot of unfortunate things about the City of Dallas, but I’m not going to generalize beyond the affordable housing industry, because that’s what I know. (If you want to understand something about the larger problem in the City of Dallas, then I’d suggest looking at Jim Schutze’s writings in the Dallas Observer over the past two weeks).

The big pot of money in affordable housing deals is 9% tax credits. The 9% tax credits are designed to pay about 75% of the cost of an affordable housing project. In return, the housing developer agrees to limits on the rents that can be charged on the units for a time period somewhere between 15 and 40 years. The amount of credits you get is determined mostly by your construction costs—you don’t get anything extra for land expenses.

As a practical matter (and I’ve blogged about this before), you can’t get the tax credits without the support of the community, both the neighborhood association (if there is one) and the elected political figures. There are also lots of hoops and a few tricks that you need to follow in designing the project, but after a while you learn how to comply with all the requirements.

If you want to make money building affordable housing (and thankfully I work at a nonprofit where that isn’t our main interest), then you need to find cheap land and you need to do lots of volume. By spending as little on land as possible, forming your own construction company and building virtually the same design many times, then you can maximize your efficiency and your profit.

Unfortunately, while that’s the most efficient way to build affordable housing, it’s also a recipe for corruption.

Permanent Power

The biggest hold up at CityWalk right now is getting the permanent power turned on. God willing, the power will finally get turned on Tuesday, but it’s been a difficult process.

We need the power on not just because every building needs electrical power, but also because some of the work in the building can’t be completed without power. Without electrical power, the elevators can’t run. No elevators means the hoist on the outside of the building has to stay in place, and that means we can’t close up the 14 doors where everyone enters and exits the hoist through the skin of the building.

No power means no air conditioning. Some of the work we need to do can’t happen until CityWalk is air conditioned. For example, ceiling tiles will warp if exposed to wide temperature swings. In short, the electrical power needs to be on—right away—if we’re going to keep the construction schedule.

For some reason the electrical power has been a problem right from the start of the project. Originally the specs called for using 480 volt power at CityWalk. Our electrical engineer checked with the power provider to make sure 480 volt power was available, and it was.

Unfortunately, apparently the electrical provider didn’t tell the engineer that there would be a $750,000 extra charge for 480 volt power, and the engineer didn’t ask. So less than a month after we started, we were looking at an extra charge that would use up the entire contingency for the construction on the project.

Our lenders were not going to be happy—0% completion and we’d used 100% of the contingency. Rather than try to explain that eventuality, we worked to redesign the system to run on 240 volt power, which was available without an extra charge, and after several months of work finally succeeded in finding a system that only cost us about half as much extra—and I did what the owner has to do, go find some more money.

The electrical system for a high rise building isn’t something you can buy off the rack. It’s all custom built. So even though we ordered the equipment last winter, it wasn’t due until this summer, and then the last of it didn’t arrive until the beginning of September. It was late.

Then the equipment took longer to assemble than planned, but finally last Saturday was set as the day to turn the power on. After a week of rain, however, we had another problem. We had a leak.

Now, I’m not a technical guy, but even I understand that water and electricity are not a good mix. So we had another delay while the leak got fixed. The only way to find out whether the leak was well and truly fixed was to test it with water. Last Tuesday when I went up to the building, someone was standing in front of 511 N. Akard watering the concrete. I’m sure passersby were baffled, but I knew he was testing for the leak.

The leak seemed to be gone, and after a pretty heavy rain on Wednesday, we were still good. Everyone was relieved. We had to be almost only the only people in Dallas happy to see yet more rain in one of the wettest falls in history, but without the rain there was no way to be sure about the leak.

If only there are no more problems, then finally, on Tuesday, October 27, permanent power will be restored to 511 N. Akard.

Then we can start using the elevators and air conditioning, and finish some of the work that’s been delayed while we wait for electrical power.

CityWalk’s Furniture

Doug McAlister was kind enough to put together an image of the furniture that we will be putting in the rooms at CityWalk. Here it is:

Tours and More Tours

As we get closer to completion at CityWalk, the tours are also getting closer together. On Tuesday, Stephen Bradley brought a couple of old friends of his from Little Rock around to see the project. Darryl Swinton is the Director of Housing and Charles Vann is a Housing Counselor for Black Community Developers, Inc. (BCD, Inc.) located in Little Rock. The BCD, Inc. is a full-service outreach of the United Methodist Church. You can read about the organization here: http://www.bcdinc.org/.

Since 1967 BCD, Inc. has been working to turn around the 12th Street area in Little Rock and bit by bit BCD, Inc. is making progress. Touring CityWalk gave us a chance to compare notes on permanent supportive housing developments and trade ideas on economic development. Sometime I hope to be able to make a return visit to their projects in Little Rock.

Then on Wednesday, a couple members of our Board of Directors were able to look at our progress after our monthly board meeting.

Garbage

Today I’m thinking about garbage. I mean that literally. I just found out that our waste compactor for CityWalk won’t be delivered for four weeks.

We hope to have people in the building in two weeks. So we have to have a solution to handle the garbage for those two weeks—in the end, as head of the organization, that means that I have to have a temporary solution for garbage disposal for two weeks.

The waste carts will be available, but they aren’t the relatively friendly little guys that all of us in Dallas use for our trash and recycling and is pictured here.

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