As many of you know, one of the tenets on which I founded DBNR was to help people who may never have had homes become home owners. I admit it: I have an altruistic streak a mile wide.
But I’m not a philanthropist (not this year, anyway). I’m committed to taking care of my family too. Only a business that makes a profit can survive long enough to help those less fortunate. The two go hand in hand.
That’s why I’m always tickled when the two literally go hand in hand, as they have in what I call our “Chicago Project.” In Chicago, we own a unit in a 20-unit condominium brick building. A second unit is being foreclosed upon by a bank. The other 18 units are owned by an investor with whom I’ve been in contact. I’m not exactly sure what his story is, but I believe he was in the middle of arranging a deal to secure the assets of the entire building when his financing started getting wobbly.
I always say that you never know where your fortune is going to come from. Fortuitously, a second person in Chicago tracked me down when he found our unit on one of several Web sites where I’d posted it. He called our toll-free number and announced that he was looking to acquire all the units in the building: ours, the other guy’s, and the bank’s.
But what do you suppose he wants to do with it? It turns out that he works with an extremely well-connected non-profit organization in Chicago, one that understands the arcane mazes governing getting city and county money for grants. He wants to convert the building into a halfway house for women released from prison. Currently, thanks to urban unemployment rates and Obama’s stimulus plan, he has access to some extraordinarily skilled laborers who’ve signed up with his group to provide low-cost labor to renovate buildings like this one.
It’s a win-win-win. DBNR sells its unit; it gets a finder’s fee for linking the guy with 18 units to the guy who wants the building in toto. A cluster of underemployed people get to work. A stream of female parolees gets housing. An empty building gets revitalized.
I still have to figure out how to connect the guy from the non-profit with the bank that owns the foreclosed 19th unit, but in the scheme of things, that’s pretty minor. The rest of it, and all those fulfilled motives, makes me smile.
