By Courtney Balestier, Contributing Writer
Image: BUILD CDC’s renovation project on East Avenue, completed with support from a Bridgeway Capital loan. Image courtesy of BUILD CDC.
“Place-based work” is a deceptively simple term for the complex web of efforts that help a community thrive. Pulling on any one thread reveals how tightly woven together the many resources, organizations, and opportunities are that shape a healthy, happy, and safe community.
A nonprofit focused in Erie’s eastside BUILD Community Development Corporation (BUILD CDC), is a great example of this. Based in one of the city’s highest-poverty census tracts, BUILD CDC grew out of a conversation between two founding board members of another placed-based organization: the Erie Center for Arts and Technology, which provides high-quality arts education for kids and career training for adults. BUILD CDC is also a subsidiary of the Hamot Health Foundation, the philanthropic arm of UPMC Hamot, which has an established local presence brokering trusted access to healthcare. All of these organizations have different ways of asking the same question: What do you need?
BUILD CDC grew out of that very question. At the same time that BUILD CDC was germinating, around 700 eastside residents were surveyed about their needs, wants, and quality of life.
“We received some really interesting responses,” said BUILD CDC Executive Director Laura Guncheon. For instance, there were calls to reactivate storefronts on the neighborhood’s once-busy East Avenue, which was now desolate and cut off from the city after significant infrastructure demolition.
“People said, ‘If you reactivate some storefronts, then perhaps we’ll get traffic back into the neighborhood,’” Guncheon said. There were requests for basic services and amenities: a laundromat, a daycare facility, a coffee shop. They wanted the local park cleaned up, so that it could once again become a safe place for children and families.
This research helped inform BUILD CDC’s four-pronged focus: career and workforce training, trusted access to healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and thriving communities. So, when Bridgeway recently worked with BUILD CDC on a construction and renovation loan for three affordable housing units and a small storefront, it was about much more than housing.
BUILD CDC reached out to Bridgeway about one of two blighted properties it had recently acquired on East Avenue. East Avenue is one of the oldest communities in the city of Erie, with properties dating back to the 1890s. This property, 1032 East Avenue, was built in the early 1900s. The building was a long-time staple in the community, but it came with unique hurdles due to its age — like gas lines in the ceilings for lighted lamps.
“You run into a lot of challenges in that regard,” Guncheon said. “But that kind of infrastructure is really cool to see.”
While much progress had been made in the project already, there was a funding gap keeping BUILD CDC from the finish line. As a founding board member of ECAT (a Bridgeway borrower), Guncheon already knew how impactful Bridgeway could be in such situations, and how beneficial it would be to start a conversation between the two organizations early.
“My strategy was to test whether Bridgeway could become a long-term partner,” Guncheon said. “Our loan was relatively small, but I wanted to establish a relationship. We have a lot of big projects in the hopper, and I wanted Bridgeway to know what we’re doing and that we are going to be a good partner. We have transformational plans for that corridor, and Bridgeway can play a large part in that conversation. So, I wanted to establish that relationship on a smaller project.
The desire to build a relationship was mutual, said Carlos Hackett, Bridgeway Commercial Real Estate Loan Officer. BUILD CDC’s mission aligns so closely with Bridgeway’s that the partnership felt like a natural fit.
“We’ve been supporting small businesses and nonprofits in Erie for more than a decade. We’re rooted in this community,” he said. “This project to support a local nonprofit to rebuild a historic building and give it new life through the creation of affordable housing is well aligned with Bridgeway’s mission. More importantly, this is not about a single transaction, but about building a relationship that we believe will deliver long-term benefit to the Erie community.”
It’s already doing just that. In keeping with BUILD CDC’s place-based work, the community is participating in its own rebuilding. The construction project at 1032 East Avenue is the first learning lab for ECAT’s on-the-job training program, pairing community members with contractors and tradesmen. This turned an extensive rehabilitation into a 360-degree education opportunity.
“It was a complete renovation: new roof, new siding, new windows. We took the interior down to the studs,” Guncheon said. “From start to finish, the students were there learning with the skilled tradesmen on the job.”
Now that the affordable housing units are complete, BUILD CDC will start rehabilitating the storefront. In keeping with Build’s place-based mission, the eventual retail tenant will be of and for the community. The housing units, meanwhile, are being master leased to a local organization that provides transitional housing for women fleeing domestic violence.
When BUILD CDC asks community members about their housing challenges, Guncheon said, responses run the gamut: high rents, pest infestation, negligent landlords, black mold, unlawful eviction, long waiting lists for Section 8. Add to that the challenges of chronic homelessness, and the needs are great.
Guncheon describes housing insecurity as a continuum, from being unhoused to finding temporary housing to securing affordable housing. Vulnerable residents can move along that continuum rapidly in the wake of a single life event. Nonprofit community developers like BUILD CDC play a critical role, helping to create pathways to safe, affordable housing.
“Traditional acquisition rehab in today’s economy is astronomically expensive, relative to building materials and all the things that need to happen for a project to get off the ground and be sustainable,” Guncheon said. “Being a nonprofit community developer, we don’t have all of that overhead that [for-profit] developers do,” Guncheon said. “We’re able to make targeted strategic investments in affordable housing in communities that need it the most.”
Now, BUILD CDC and Bridgeway have an established working relationship that can make more investments possible and help those investments work harder for the communities they serve. It’s a relationship that Guncheon looks forward to growing.
“I don’t want to be cliché here, but it was about as easy as it could possibly be,” she said of working with Bridgeway. “To know that I can call Carlos anytime and A. he’ll get back to me right away, and B. he’ll answer my question — it’s just great to have that relationship. This was a very small project. To be treated on a small project the way folks are treated on a huge project says a lot about how a Bridgeway approaches their work.”
Learn More
Curious about what the construction and renovation loan process is like? Commercial Real Estate Loan Officer Carlos Hackett chatted about BUILD CDC’s lending journey for our Bridgeway in Action! series.
About Courtney Balestier
Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Saveur, Oxford American, New York, Wired, and others. Her writing has been anthologized in The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell (Ohio University Press, 2019) Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UGA Press, 2014) and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the creator and host of WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write.