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September 19, 2008
A Cornerstone Called CHAI
How an Associated agency solidified the Jewish integrity of Park Heights
Barbara Pash
Associate Editor
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When Shoshana Cardin looks at Upper Park Heights, she sees a vibrant Jewish neighborhood.
When Jon Kolker looks at the same place, he sees a success story not only for the Jewish community but for Baltimore City as well.
But that view was not guaranteed. It could all have turned out quite differently. It took vision and action to achieve that result.
Twenty-five years ago, the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore created an agency, Comprehensive Housing Assistance, Inc., or CHAI, to accomplish that goal. A lot of hopes were riding on it. A lot of doubts surrounded it. This is the story of what happened.
At the time, Upper Park Heights was a primarily Jewish neighborhood that was beginning to fail. “People were leaving and new people were not coming in any significant numbers,” says Mrs. Cardin, a former chair of the Associated board who was board vice chair then.
“The neighborhoods [within Upper Park Heights] weren’t united,” Mrs. Cardin continues. “The synagogues weren’t growing. Much of the population was elderly Jews who couldn’t do or couldn’t afford to do the repairs on their homes. The neighborhood was deteriorating.”
Mr. Kolker, also a former Associated board chair, was chair of its planning and budgeting committee. “We had the experience of Lower Park Heights, from Park Circle to Pimlico,” he says. “We saw the decline of that similarly vibrant Jewish neighborhood and it got us thinking.”
In Upper Park Heights, though, the Associated had a huge potential problem on its hands. Its Jewish Community Center, Baltimore Hebrew University and Greenstein Building, home to its social service agencies, were all located there.
So were several major congregations, which lined the avenue north to the Baltimore County line. Sinai Hospital of Baltimore and Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital were nearby.
“There was a major Jewish infrastructure there,” says Mr. Kolker. “We had to take some action.”
The migration of Jews out of once-Jewish neighborhoods wasn’t unique to Baltimore. It was happening around the country and other federations were searching for ways to address it.
Associated leaders began to ask around. They heard about a program in Cleveland, Ohio, that seemed to be having some success. A group flew out to investigate.
“We were impressed,” says Mrs. Cardin, a member of the group, as was Mr. Kolker, who, back in Baltimore, put together a similar program, based on local circumstances.
Within Associated, an agency called CHAI already existed. It stood for Comprehensive Housing for the Aging, Inc., and its mission was to promote elderly housing although Associated’s only senior facility at the time was the Concord House [now Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Place].
In 1983, a brand-new CHAI was born. The acronym was the same but the letters now stood for Comprehensive Housing Assistance, Inc. It had a new mission, too, neighborhood stabilization.
Not everyone loved the idea. There were a lot of questions, and no answers.
Says Mr. Kolker, “This was a new type of activity for federations.”
Says Mrs. Cardin, “The Associated board created CHAI. Some [board members] were more optimistic than others, but they were willing to let us try.”
CHAI is located in a small renovated house on Park Heights Avenue, across from the JCC. Kenneth N. Gelula sits at a long table in the conference room, a modest space whose main decoration is a large map of the agency’s five-neighborhood “focus area” — Cheswolde, Cross Country, Fallstaff, Glen and Mount Washington — tacked to a wall.
Mr. Gelula is not alone. Sitting next to him is Aaron Max, a commercial real estate investor who, having served on the board and risen through the ranks of officerships, is CHAI’s president.
Mr. Gelula is a quiet, unassuming man who tends to avoid the spotlight. At events like the official opening of yet another Harry and Jeanette Weinberg senior building that would not exist without CHAI, he prefers to stay in the background, letting others stand at the podium and accept the applause. Get him alone and on the subject of CHAI, though, and Mr. Gelula lights up, enthusiastically recounting every detail of its workings.
Mr. Gelula was a senior planner in Associated’s planning department when the decision was made to re-invent CHAI. He applied for the job of director and got it, even though he was stepping into uncharted territory.
“We started in the basement of Beth Jacob Congregation,” says Mr. Gelula. “It was me and one other person.”
From those humble, uncertain beginnings, he has built an agency with a staff of 20 and a budget of over $2 million. It oversees nine different programs; has built and/or manages 11 senior adult facilities (with three more possibly on the way); and impacts almost 27,000 residents in its focus area alone, about 65 percent of whom are Jewish and the rest mainly African-American, with a growing Latino population.
“I wish I could clone CHAI for the whole city,” says Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, the Democratic City Councilwoman whose 5th District includes Upper Park Heights. In the 2001 U.S. Census, the most current, “it was the only neighborhood in the city that increased in population.”
To Mr. Gelula, the events could have taken place yesterday, so fresh are they in his mind. With $45,000 from Associated and $40,000 from Baltimore City, he recalls, CHAI launched its mission via low-interest loans to home-buyers.
The housing stock in Upper Park Heights was old, 50 to 60 years old. The homes needed improvements and the loans were intended to offset that cost. CHAI also worked with home-buyers to find a bank with the best terms.
Says CHAI president Mr. Max, “There was great value in the [Upper Park Heights] neighborhood. The [housing] prices were competitive with real estate elsewhere in the city. With CHAI’s money, you got great value for the housing product.”
Yitzhok and Cronshi Englander were renting an apartment. They had two children and a third on the way and they needed more space. As a young couple just starting out, though, they could not afford to buy.
Then they heard about CHAI and its loan program. They began looking in Upper Park Heights although, frankly, says Mrs. Englander, “People thought we were nuts. They were moving out to Smith-Greenspring and they’d written it off.”
But the Englanders had a different idea. They liked the area’s quiet atmosphere and tall leafy trees. They liked the big old houses. When they bought their two-story, single-family house in the Glen neighborhood 24 years ago, mortgages were hovering at 14 percent, with 10 percent down for a 30-year mortgage. With CHAI’s help, they qualified for an 11 3/4 percent mortgage.
“We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” says Mrs. Englander, an Agudath Israel member who manages her husband’s dental practice.
The Englander’s subsequently got a low-interest loan from CHAI to renovate their circa 1930s house. They paid under $75,000; today, its value has doubled.
As for the neighborhood, says Mrs. Englander, a past vice president of the Glen Neighborhood Improvement Association, “We’ve watched it become a safe, stable place to live.”
Upper Park Heights was not the only Baltimore City neighborhood undergoing what has been called “white flight.” At a café in Roland Park, Mark Sissman munches on a bagel, sips coffee and remembers the tumultuous era.
Mr. Sissman, president of Healthy Neighborhoods, a nonprofit that does development projects in the city, was deputy commissioner of the city’s housing department at the time. He first encountered CHAI in that capacity.
“The city was undergoing a racial transformation,” he says between sips, “and it was occurring in a lot of places for a lot of reasons. Big changes were happening quickly, fueled not only by a desire [to move to the suburbs] but by block-busting and racism.”
The techniques CHAI used — the low-interest loans, the hand-holding through the home-buying process, the neighborhood organization — were not unique to the agency, or to Baltimore. Mr. Sissman’s Healthy Neighborhoods uses the same tools today.
But CHAI, he says, “put them together in a disciplined way.”
As it turned out, Upper Park Heights attracted a largely Orthodox population. In Associated’s 2000 demographic survey, the most current, 43 percent of metro Baltimore’s Orthodox live there. So predominantly Orthodox are CHAI’s five focus neighborhoods that some accuse the agency of creating an Orthodox ghetto.
Mr. Gelula shakes his head. That was certainly not the intent although the result is understandable.
“We didn’t know who the market would be,” he says of the loan program. “But because of the location of the Orthodox shuls, the affordable housing and the public schools [which had no Jewish students], that’s who bought.”
Ruth Guggenheim seconds Mr. Gelula. For 11 years, until 1998, Ms. Guggenheim was CHAI’s director of home-ownership services. “We did so many outreach programs, with publicity and flyers, to get Jews from different backgrounds” to look at Upper Park Heights, says Ms. Guggenheim, who is now executive director of Jews for Judaism.
“It didn’t happen,” she says.
Not everyone sees an Orthodox majority as a problem. Mr. Gelula certainly doesn’t. Neither does Eli Schlossberg, a businessman and member of Shomrei Emunah who grew up in the area and still lives there.
As the neighborhood became increasingly Orthodox, its institutions followed. Mr. Schlossberg can reel off a list of them, from new and/or expanded shuls to a community mikvah and the eruv, a ritual enclosure that allows Sabbath-observant Jews to carry certain items.
In the last few years, Mr. Schlossberg says, Upper Park Heights’ reputation has extended beyond Baltimore. Known as a welcoming observant community, it has been attracting Orthodox Jews from New York and Los Angeles who have been priced out of those housing markets.
“It’s one of the fastest growing Orthodox communities in the country,” he says of Upper Park Heights.
Even in today’s slow real estate market, the neighborhood is holding its own, although it has experienced the same fluctuation in housing prices as the rest of the country.
Up to 2005, there was an unprecedented rise in housing prices. The average single-family house in Upper Park Heights cost around $325,000. Since then, prices have dropped five to 10 percent, in line with the national picture, says Carole Fradkin, a veteran realtor with Coldwell Banker.
Mrs. Fradkin is a past president of Associated’s Women’s Department and a past president of Associated’s Jewish Vocational Services. She has served on the CHAI board and currently chairs its senior home services committee.
“No one agency can do it all. It’s a partnership with other agencies,” she says of CHAI and Upper Park Heights.
But Mrs. Fradkin isn’t trying to take anything away from CHAI. The fact remains, Upper Park Heights is considered a desirable neighborhood. In the past year alone, 10 families bought houses there. When Mrs. Fradkin goes to national meetings with other federations, they want to know how they can replicate its services.
“For many of these home-buyers — mostly young families, many observant, with young children — they can walk to shul. They go to the JCC. Their friends are there,” says Mrs. Fradkin. “They feel that they’re buying into a community.”
In 1990, Associated did a study of elderly Jews in the northwest area. Specifically, it looked at their housing needs. The finding was not good. There was a serious lack of housing for low-income seniors.
“People were making decisions between paying the rent or eating three meals a day,” recalls Cass Gottlieb, a Mount Washington resident who was president of CHAI at the time.
Over the next 10 years, the study estimated, more than 1,000 senior housing units would be needed, either new construction or rehabbed older buildings. CHAI was asked to do it.
“It was a specific mandate from Associated. They had the expertise and it was consistent with their mission,” says Michael Hoffman, Associated’s vice president of community planning and allocations.
So CHAI entered its next phase, the one that is most visible and for which it is probably best known now. A tour of Park Heights, Pikesville and, most recently, Owings Mills, turns up the many, many senior buildings with the names Harry and Jeanette Weinberg attached to them.
To date, CHAI has put over 1,400 units of “affordable,” in the jargon, elderly housing in the market. But that hardly tells the story. So popular, and obviously needed, are the efficiencies, one-and two-bedroom buildings that there are waiting lists to get in. CHAI has also rehabbed older buildings, like its $10 million redo of the Manhattan Park Apartments.
Mr. Gelula talks about this turn of events. To him, CHAI’s senior housing is not a departure but, rather, a continuation of its mission.
He points in the direction of the Manhattan Park Apartments, located next to CHAI and across the street from the JCC. “It’s part of the neighborhood. What happens to it affects the neighborhood,” he says of the circa 1970s building whose owners asked CHAI to take it over.
“The mission is the same, yet evolved,” says Mr. Gelula. “There are different ways to make it happen.”
Ina Singer has a tale to tell. Ms. Singer, a CHAI board member, ran into a man whose mother had moved into one of the Weinberg buildings. His mother used to babysit for her grandchildren, but not anymore, he complained.
Now, he told Ms. Singer, “She’s too busy with this club and that activity. Her life has changed.”
“You could cry,” says Ms. Singer.
Before she retired, Ms. Singer was the director of multi-family housing for Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was responsible for allocating millions of federal dollars for the construction of affordable senior housing. CHAI was one of her clients.
It sounds like a lot of money but it’s actually a limited pool, spread over three jurisdictions and the competition is fierce. Nonprofits like The Archdiosce of Baltimore and the Govans Ecumenical Development Corporation (GEDCO) are players in metro Baltimore.
HUD grants are not intended to pay for the entire building. Other funding partners must be found and, in CHAI’s case, one of them has been the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. The foundation has given CHAI $17.5 million in grants over the last 15 years.
Says Barry Schloss, the foundations’s treasurer and a trustee, the foundation considers CHAI “one of our central components” in its own mission of helping the poor and the elderly.
At Pola Glazer’s apartment, the phone doesn’t stop ringing. Are you coming to dinner? Will we see you later for cards? “Everybody loves me,” says Mrs. Glazer, a feisty 88-year-old who lives in Weinberg Woods, behind the Edward A. Myerberg Senior Center. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that. I try to help people.”
Mrs. Glazer, a widow with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, moved into her one-bedroom apartment in 1999. She was one of the original tenants, and there was a lottery to get in.
When she heard she’d won, says Mrs. Glazer, who had been renting an apartment in Pikesville, “I felt like it was a present for my 80th birthday.” Now, she volunteers at the senior center lunch (“I tell everyone what to do”), dines out with her children and plays poker almost every night with her neighbors.
“I’ve loved living here since day one,” says Mrs. Glazer. “People say life begins at 40. For me, it began at 80.”
Besides building and rehabbing senior facilities, CHAI has other programs that address senior housing needs. One program offers home repairs and modifications to seniors living in their own homes. Another provides services to seniors living in certain area rental apartment buildings.
In the field, the buzzword is NORC, for Naturally Occuring Retirement Communities. It means a geographic area with a large concentration of elderly people.
In the past few years, the state of Maryland and the federal government have given money to support programs in NORCs. The idea is, it’s cheaper to help seniors “age in place,” another technical term, than to build senior housing.
Bev Schiff lives in her childhood home. It’s a brick semi-attached in the Fallstaff neighborhood that she left when she got married. Decades later, she and her husband moved back when her mother died.
Now a widow, Mrs. Schiff, 72, only has praise for CHAI. “If I need something done, like a plumber, I call CHAI and they get someone for me,” she says of the agency’s home repair program.
The program has taken care of other things, too. It has retrofitted her circa 1950s house for senior living, like installing grab bars in the bathroom. In the fall, volunteers cover her windows with plastic and trim her shrubs outside. It has even found her a “gently used” sofa for her living room.
“It’s hard enough to pay the bills,” says Mrs. Schiff, whose income is limited. “I couldn’t live here without the help of CHAI.”
According to the Associated’s Mr. Hoffman, CHAI was ahead of the curve on NORCs. It was one of a handful of nonprofits that participated in a pilot project that led to the implementation of the federal NORC program. Over a five-year period, it brought $2.5 million NORC money into the local community.
“CHAI is one of the most visionary agencies within Associated,” says Mr. Hoffman.
Twenty-five years later, Shoshana couldn’t be more satisfied with how it has all turned out. “CHAI has done exactly what we wanted,” says Mrs. Cardin, “and probably better, because we didn’t know exactly what to expect.”
What the next 25 years will bring is unknown. The answer may lie in a major community housing study that is now going on. CHAI and other Associated agencies are collaborating on it. When finished, it will lay out the issues facing the northwest area, both in the city and the county.
“It will shape our next 25 years,” Mr. Gelula says of CHAI.
But even as a future strategic plan is in the works, the broad strokes are likely to stay the same. One is CHAI’s core mission of neighborhood stabilization, however that is interpreted.
The number of elderly, and the subsequent need for senior housing and senior home services, is only going to rise. By one estimate, the number of “frail elderly,” individuals age 80 and up, in the Baltimore Jewish community will triple by 2015, from 4,500 to 15,000 seniors.
Mr. Gelula is already looking for ways to increase volunteerism in CHAI programs, and a study to that effect is due out next year. He is also emphasizing CHAI’s involvement in the community as a whole. The agency partnered with school and neighborhood leaders to install a playground at Falstaff Elementary School.
After all, Iris Smith is the face of Upper Park Heights, too. Mrs. Smith has lived in the Glen neighborhood for over 30 years. A social worker, Mrs. Smith, who is African-American, is the immediate past president of the Glen Neighborhood Improvement Association. She raised two children there and remembers when they delivered flyers door-to-door announcing the group’s meetings.
“I love where I live,” she says.
Mrs. Smith has worked closely with Mr. Gelula and other CHAI staffers on issues of importance to Upper Park Heights. “CHAI listens to the African-American community,” she says. “They can be as active in its efforts as they want to be.”
No one said it would be easy. Neighborhoods are a moving target that need continual reinvestment.
CHAI president Mr. Max puts it best. “It’s been an incredible process to get to this point,” he says.
One thing’s for sure. CHAI’s next 25 years promise to be as exciting as its first 25.
CHAI At A Glance
The Associated agency’s major programs are:
• Home-Ownership Counseling Information on homes for sale; referrals to housing professionals; prepurchase counseling; secondary financing for settlement expenses and home renovatons
• Home-Buyer Loan Assistance Loans toward settlement and home rehab expenses up to $25,000. Also, referrals to other, available loan programs
• Healthy Neighborhoods Partnership with city-wide Healthy Neighborhoods organizations and Glen Neighborhood Improvement Association
• Senior Housing Development and Management New construction and rehabilitation of existing buildings; manages the properties and coordinates resident services
• Senior Home Repair Program Helps low-income senior adults and disabled households with repairs, modifications and assistive devices
• Neighborhoods Assisting Directly in Volunteerism Expands community assistance to isolated seniors in their own homes
• Senior Friendly Neighbor-hoods Program Collaborative program of services to seniors in apartment buildings throughout Park Heights and in Millbrook, often in cooperation with property owners and managers
• Community Development Organizes and supports community-building and neighborhood projects that enhance the quality of life
• Northwest School -Community Partnership Collaborative program to enhance local public schools