Oberlin's Sustainable Community Associates

A couple of blocks from the Main Street in Oberlin is a lot that used to be a car dealer, a dry cleaner, and restaurant chain that all ended up being vacant. Acquired by Sustainable Community Associates, the abandoned brownfield will become a sustainably designed, mixed-use building containing 46 apartments for sale and 12,000 square feet of commercial space. The founders of Sustainable Community Associates are Ben Ezinga, Joshua Rosen and Naomi Sabel. Cool Cleveland's CIO George Nemeth spent time with them recently discovering why their development is different and why the Civic Innovation Lab gave them a grant.

If I say "what does Sustainable Community Associates mean to you…?" In fact, let’s go down the line and say, “Here’s how I would explain it to someone.”

Naomi Sabel: I think what we’re trying to do is projects that take on social issues…

What would a social issue that you would want to take on be?

NS: If you look Oberlin, we were trying to deal with affordable housing, mixed-income housing and stepping away from the model of geographically isolating income drifts. We’re looking at a component for economic development and a support structure for community and vitalization that has a more active, vibrant downtown. I think that we want to work on projects that reflect the issues facing each community, and not do a boiler plate project for whatever we do next, but really have developments speak to the needs of the local community.

Okay. Josh?

Joshua Rubin: I think Sustainable Community Associates is about taking on challenges that other people think either nothing could be done or that someone would be crazy to do, and you tackle those challenges, and I think that’s really what for me this Oberlin project has been about. People would tell us, “Well, downtown has stayed this way for 50 years, and the east side has never been developed,” and there was a lot of people talking about what isn’t possible, and I think we, at our core, are trying to figure out every day what is possible, and I think that’s sort of been our MO from the beginning.

NS: And pushing that “What is possible?” and answering that question and then moving it forward. Then “What’s next?” and what would we have considered before is now possible because we’re thinking in these terms. So it’s pushing out that definition.

Ben Ezinga: I think one of the things that we do well and that has gotten us as far as we’ve gotten is recognizing opportunities and seeing connections that might not be apparent to other people. For instance the land that we’ve got I think now is obviously an awesome site to develop and a lot of people can see that, but if you’d look at it ten years ago, the opportunity might not have been apparent. Green building is another interesting example where a lot of people say, “Green building is something for yuppies buying half million dollar lofts,” and we say, “No, green building is something for somebody who works as a secretary at the college and could really use it to save $60 a month on their heating bill.”It’s making it relevant to people who don’t pay attention to it because it’s not being directed towards them.

Something that you brought up reminds of the New York Times article and I wanted to ask you about that, because when you went out looking for investment, one of the people that you contacted was quoted saying something to the effect of, “When I was going to school there and I walked by the site we didn’t see the potential.” Talk about identifying that opportunity and your thinking has evolved getting into this project, Ben.

BE: I wish we could be as visionary as … But no, as far as recognizing that opportunity with the land, the property just came on the market the spring of our senior year of college, and we just started talking. We said, “There are so many different opportunities, so many different things that could be done with this land that aren’t being done with it, one of them has got to work out,” and it was when we started getting into the details of like, “All right, there’s a reason why that spot’s not being used right now,” and getting into changing the perceptions of that area we realized, “All right, we’re not going to be able to do it with just one piece of property. If we want people to look at the east side of downtown differently than they do right now, we need to get all the way to a corner and we need to give people a reason to go there and we need to increase the population of the area so that there’s people walking there 24 hours a day. Put a critical mass of businesses into the downtown as opposed to Oberlin’s being something you drive through, it’s got everything you need. As a resident, then there’s a reason to come downtown to do your shopping. As a visitor, there's enough here that it’s worth making a weekend trip out to Oberlin.

NS: I think that’s one of the things that was different for us than it might have been when Richard was walking by the site, 40 years ago. I think Oberlin finds itself in a very different place now. It finds itself, being encroached upon by, vinyl-sided…

Wal-Marts? (laughter)

NS: Wal-Marts and vinyl-sided cul-de-sac. Southern Lorain County is a population growth area, and all of the national trends that have been occurring are coming home to roost in Oberlin. The context was very appropriate for us to be thinking in these directions.

That’s an interesting point that you bring up. In contrast with Lorain, who is a different kind of development, you’re saying, “Wait a second. We want to think about these things like sustainability, green building, and conservation... go ahead.

JR: Oberlin in the next 20 years is either going to continue to feel like a unique village, or it’s going to be a place you drive through to go to Wal-Mart and Joann Fabrics. Its fate will be determined for the next ten years. We heard from a lot of people who have been living in Oberlin a long time who thought that was impossible. It occurred to us not having lived here our whole lives, comingfrom an outside perspective, not knowing exactly why things were impossible. That was our greatest asset from the beginning was…

Fresh eyes.

JR: Yeah, it was the fresh eyes and you could even call it naiveté. I think just for us it was, “We're all are graduating. We all know we want to do something good in the world. Whatever that means, I’m not able to define it, but we all want to do some good.” As we were pondering what we would be doing, it just seemed like the opportunity to do great in Oberlin with the existing site, one we couldn’t find in San Francisco or Chicago or New York. I think that’s what allowed us to keep pushing over time when things didn’t go our way at first or when funding was hard to come by, was that we were really after something that wouldn’t just make a small little ripple, but it would really have these concentric circles and spread out into a huge impact. I think that’s what motivated us, and just to go back to your first question, when I think about what we are about now and in the future, it’s about finding similar sort of challenges like that and making them work.

I wanted to pick up something that Naomi had said earlier about how “this opportunity presented itself” when you were thinking about all these things that you could do. I’m curious where all of you came from, what you majored in in school, and I then I really want to go back to this whole, “we were just sitting around talking about what this site could become.” So Naomi, why don’t you go first?

NS: I’m originally from Athens, Ohio. It’s a very large university town.

Why didn’t you go to Ohio University?

NS: I wanted to protect my liver.

(laughter)

NS: I attended classes there when I was in high school, yet Oberlin sort of spoke more to me than OU did at that time. But I studied Politics and Environmental Studies.

Josh?

JR: I’m originally from Miami, Florida, never saw snow before I came to Oberlin, Ohio, so sort of decided I wanted to get out of Miami When I came to Oberlin, I thought everyone very nice, so I just sort of idealized the Midwest as a great place to spend the next part of my life in the complete opposite of growing up in Miami…

You majored in?

JR: Politics.

Ben?

BE: I’m from Upstate New York, from a small town near Albany. I’ve always lived in small towns. I’ll spend a summer in San Francisco or something like that, but for the most part, I’ve always lived in small towns and I just have always like the potential, especially in small town downtowns.

Great. Okay, let me ask you about your hometown. Is it similar in feel or layout to Oberlin?

BE: If you took the college out, it’s a little smaller. Chatham, if you ever drive through Upstate New York.

Major was the other question.

BE: Economics.

How did you guys meet?

JR: (indicating to Ben) We were Freshman year roommates.

NS: So the amazing Oberlin housing lottery system has really worked for us.

So it was really random. (laughter)

BE: Speaking for myself, I was a little unsure about putting together a resume and going out on the job market. I had done a lot of community work in town and I felt like, I could reverse the trend of college students coming, engaging in the town and then graduating and taking the skill sets they’ve gained and going elsewhere, so I did AmeriCorps for a year and a half after I graduated from Oberlin College and then began to develop this project.

Okay. So you two were roommates. Naomi, how did you come into the picture?

NS: We became friends through Politics classes, and then we all united on some campus agitation thing, and then we all became buddies.

The reason I’m pursuing that is because David Orr is an advisor to the project...

NS: He was my advisor in college.

JR: An incredible mentor.

BE: Spiritual mentor also.

I’m trying draw the connections. You guys were active in Politics. You were doing this activist thing, and then you had the double major of…

NS: Politics and Environmental.

And that’s an interesting double major. Is this project a reflection of that?

NS: I think to some extent, that the overlap between Politics, Environmental Studies and Economics is very inherent to the project, and I think that each of us has brought that perspective.

JR: I think one of the best things that an Oberlin college education does, whatever your major is, is it teaches you to question conventions, and I think, as we approached what could a project look like, we were able to not just simply accept what is the status quo for real estate development, but challenge it in a lot of ways.

NS: But David is amazing at finding the connections between those things and understanding where something is, needs improvement, but then seeing how that should impact everything else, and where…

Big picture thinking?

NS: Yeah, he’s a fantastic big picture thinker.

BE: Outside the box thinker.

JR: He could find things outside the box, and that phrase is not allowed.

BE: Oh what? Big picture thinking is allowed and outside the box isn’t? (laughter)

I’ll suspend all my corporate clichés and things like that as much as possible.

NS: We’ve termed it platitudinous. You’re just ridiculous and talking in platitudes. But I think, just to go back to it, I think part of what we were talking about in our Politics classes and part of our what we were talking about in Environmental Studies classes, which is all of these national trends and where we’re going in this country and what we’re building and how that reflects our values and our Pyrenees of consumption. Oberlin is relatively untouched by that so far, and I think it was interesting to have those conversations going on and not seeing them permeate the community at all and really being relegated to the classroom, but then applied, when the student graduates and goes to work somewhere else. It seemed like Oberlin was an excellent place to try to bring some of those discussions into a community-wide basis.

BE: I definitely think one of the things that will make Oberlin a far better, more progressive place to live, a better community, is if we can keep more people. Just like Cleveland has a brain drain issue, Oberlin has a brain drain issue too in some ways. We don’t have a group of people, with the exceptions of us and a few others in their mid-20s to mid-30s who are working here on projects that bring that level of energy to the town. There’s not a lot of people in between the student and the classroom in a lot of ways, and so I feel like one of the best things that our project’s done is nothing to do with real estate development, but it’s give other students and people who are graduating a context for what you could do on a local level once you graduate.

I think that’s the experience of a small college town. I grew up in Painesville, Ohio and Lake Erie College is a mirror of Oberlin. It’s a small, liberal arts college. You’ve got people from all over the world that come there and study, but there’s not a membrane between academia and the students and the surrounding area, and until you go back to that project or opportunity that presents itself in the community context there’s no interaction either that or historically the interaction has always been in confrontations, right? If something’s going on on campus and the neighbors are getting upset about it, or vice versa, like with the Wal-Mart down the street, right? The students are saying, “Our values are screwed up here,” and the community’s saying, “Well wait a second. We need this stuff.”

NS: Our economics are screwed up.

I think that that was something else that you said that I thought was really interesting, too. It’s the intersection of the environment, politics and economics, right? I think that that’s probably been one of the realizations that you’ve had, as SCA it takes money to do this stuff.

BE: That was probably the first thing we figured out.

Talk about coming out of this academic environment and having this vision for things and then having to funding your stuff. Everybody’s putting their finger up.

JR: Sometimes we’re so into the day-to-day, what we have to get done today, we don’t reflect as much as we should, so I’m just thinking about this ...

If it’s easier to start from the day-to-day stuff and then get to that area...

JR: No, the day-to-day stuff, there’s legal stuff, government grants and that. It’s nothing, and then it’s like reflecting back over the last couple of years of it and then being like, “All right, well how did we get to where we are today in terms of the…” The way that getting the financing package was so… It’s one of the more complicated ones that you’ll see for any real estate development, let alone for like somebody’s first real estate project, so…

It’s not number 11; it’s number one.

NS: When you asked us to define what SCA was and I started with these projects that are driven to fulfill some sort of social need, and I think to me, that impacts our economics. We designed a project that we thought best spoke to the social needs of Oberlin, that had a housing component, that had an environmental component and had an economic development component. It spoke to those issues as variables of a larger topic, rather than as isolated components. Then we sat around and were a little bit fuddled about how we’d pay for it. The cost of revenue curves never matched up and we realized that we could either pair back the project and do less, or we could work with the sectors that are responsible for furthering the social good: the public sector, the private sector, the philanthropic sector. All of those to some extent are responsible for holding what is good for the community, and we invovled people from those sectors on this project, knowing that it wasn’t just a for-profit real estate development. It certainly wasn’t a non-profit community development corporation, and it was this hybrid that had to galvanize and speak to all of them.

BE: I was just thinking back. It was really good that we didn’t come to this with what you call like a standard real estate development background because...

JR: It wouldn’t have happened.

BE: When a real estate developer goes…

NS: Because we're in Sheffield...

Right, we were commenting about that, like it would be so much easier to drop this down in the middle of the cornfield someplace.

BE: And that’s what people do, and they look at a parcel of land, sketch out some numbers and they say, “All right, well what percent return can I get on the equity here?” and if it’s less than x, then the project doesn’t go, whereas we came at it from the exact opposite direction, which is, as Naomi was saying, like “What needs to happen here?” and then , “How do we make this happen?” ‘cause there’s other people that want to see this happen too. There are government programs that are designed to help struggling downtowns. There are programs that are designed for affordable housing. There are philanthropists who like green building. There are philanthropists who like green building and affordable housing. The City wants to see new jobs and new tax revenue, but at the same time hasn’t made the investments in downtown infrastructure, like water and sewer and road systems. So it was a question of getting all of these players on the same page with “All right, here’s what can happen, if this government program and this government program and this philanthropist and the City does this and then these people all buy their nice condos and we bring the affordable housing this way, are you guys on board? Do you want to see this in your downtown?” That was the question, not “What percent return can we generate?”

SCA is about community building and community interacting, right? I mean it’s not just, “Yeah, look. We’re community associates. It’s part of the name.” It’s, “We have to go through this process of making the connections, building the case...”

JR: Fundamentally I have no interest in doing something that the community does not want. If a community didn’t want this, I wouldn’t be here. So we were able to sort of engage the community. One of the first things we did was we got $50,000 from Oberlin College, $50,000 from the City of Oberlin, $50,000 from the Holland Foundation, which is a local Oberlin foundation, to engage in sort of a master planning process with the community and to understand what the needs were, what all the different stakeholders wanted to see, and then try to wrap an economic model around the plan that represented 75% of what all the stakeholders wanted, and that was the first big public thing we did there to get the buy in the community. It’s interesting over time, I will say that. If we were totally dependent on 100%… This was hard for us in the beginning. This is not really answering your question, but I think in the beginning we wanted to have everyone in the community support us at all times with everything we’re doing, and if that didn’t happen, that was a problem. Now I think we’ve come to understand that we want to get the community on board. We want them to buy into what we’re doing, but fundamentally, we’re not going to be able to accommodate everyone’s desire for the site, and if we try to, we would be failing, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. So what we have tried to do is try to address all of these issues in some way. Obviously we’d like to have more affordable housing. We’d like to have a LEED platinum building, as opposed to a LEED gold building. There are a lot choices we’ve had to make along the way that aren’t exactly what we'd planned to be doing. That’s been an interesting topic.

NS: But at the same time, I think that we’ve been relatively successful in upholding the integrity of it.

BE: That’s why we got into this. It’s not, like, “Hey, let’s make a bunch of money,” because Oberlin and Northeast Ohio in general are not…

Great places to do it. Right.

NS: That's the good thing about having a diversity of funders, because every time you want to stray from what I would say are the social goals, you have the investors who would say, “That’s not why I signed on. What do you mean you’re not doing affordable housing?” or “What do you mean you’re not building a green building?” Not that it was ever an issue, because we weren’t just responsible to the bank. We were responsible to the philanthropists, and we were responsible to the City, and so that’s really good.

JR: And I think that’s an important thing to communicate. Doing the green building costs more money, a little bit more money up front. It’s good business for us. So when this project is finished and we have one of the only LEED gold buildings in the Midwest, that’s good business for us. Having mixed income housing is not simply like us accomplishing one of our social goals. I mean it is, but it’s more than that. I think it also makes good business sense for us. It’s good economic sense for us. None of these things we’re doing are simply philanthropic. They all make sense on a lot of levels on how we see how businesses run in the next ten, twenty years.

BE: I was just going to say, because it’s in a lot of way the revenue, the fundamental business that we’re in, it’s building and selling nice condos, and it’s if you can go to somebody and not just say “This looks like the other thing that you’re looking at in Westlake, but this is a reflection of your social values. You get to live in a green building. You get to live in an economically integrated building. You’re participating in downtown revitalization and making sure that this historic downtown doesn’t just go the way of a lot of other historic downtowns around here when a Wal-Mart comes in.

NS: I don’t think we realize the market opportunity in providing housing that’s speak to social values, and I think it’s gigantic.

I think you're on the cusp of that, because it’s hard to determine, especially in the Midwest, the decisions that people are making when it comes to those things, but definitely the needle’s moving.

JR: Just to piggyback on what you all were saying, I don’t think someone has chosen to put a deposit on a $250,000 condo simply as a political stance, but I think having mixed-income housing is not a turnoff to them like we hear. People we’re dealing with, it’s not, “Oh, I don’t want that kind of community.” They want that kind of community. They see Wal-Mart coming, they want to actually invest in the downtown. So for us, all the things that other developers might shy away from, not only do we believe that they are the right thing to do, but we think they’re the reason why the demand for our product is what it is. If we weren’t doing mixed-income housing, we’d have less people on our waiting list. If we weren’t doing a green building, less people. My point is it isn’t all philanthropic on our end. It’s a choice we’re making and it’s a choice that we probably have to make in order to have this project be as successful as it is.

NS: 87% of the units have deposits on them and we’re not even in construction.

JR: And we’re not spending any money on marketing.

NS: No, and I think that speaks to the desire for people to have something else, something that’s not what’s currently in a supply stream.

Well I think you have people who are making these decisions, because most of the time businesses, going back to what you’re saying is that kind of back the envelope calculation that you make on a parcel of land, right? They like to treat everything in that very kind of simplified like, “Here’s the reason why people are making these decisions,” where people, their decision making process is much more complex and they have their values. They have their economics. They have their political perspective. All of that weighs in on it. I think that’s great. Let’s talk about completing this project, and then I want to talk, because you had mentioned what your business is going to be like in ten and 20 years. So short-term, what’s going to be happening, and then what’s the vision for Sustainable Community Associates? Anyone can start.

BE: We’re in the midst of getting all of our construction documents and doing all of the legal work that we need to set up the various entities that all the funds we have will flow through. We would like to break ground sometime I believe between April and June, and our contractors are telling us it’ll take about 12 months to build. We are in the process of doing outreach to the independent businesses or people who want to own independent business in our building. It’s opened up. We have 12,000 square feet of retail space, so we’re ideally not going to have any chains in the building (that’s our goal), and so we’re in the process of finding them, just like we’re finding people who want the sort of housing we’re offering, we’re also trying to find retailers who sort of buy into the concept that they don’t want to be next to a Starbucks. They want to be next to another mom and pop store, and so trying to find people who buy into that vision. We just got a $30,000 grant from the Civic Innovation Lab to start to work closely with small businesses who are interested in sort of incubation space within our project so that sort of by Day 1 they are ready to sort of open and be successful and grow, and they can stay in the spaces at a subsidized rate for a couple of years before they have to sort of launch and move on to unsubsidized space. On a local level, it’s like the Environmental Studies major who came up to us and said, “I want to have a small clean building supply store. How can we start them off in here for a couple of years?” The City of Oberlin is issuing bonds and contributing $1.4 million into the project. All of these larger real estate developments have city funds going into them. It makes great philosophical sense from our point of view that actually local businesses have a chance to open up projects with local taxpayers dollars being applied towards it. That’s this whole concept, which is we’re not just building a building and giving people a shopping opportunity. We’re also giving their neighbor on Oak Street an opportunity to open up a business for the first time in this context. That was the philosophy behind the grant. We have these amazing mentors: Deb Janik from the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Pat Gammons, are both mentors for the Civic Innovation Lab and agreed to take on this project.

What’s the vision ? In ten to twenty years, what do you want to be doing?

BE: I think we want to be doing more projects like that. I mean it’s never going to involve the identical mix of funding sources, but I think what we’ve learned here is going to be really relevant for the next project and the next project after that, which is if you see an opportunity and then keep at it, you will be able to find the partners and the government programs and the philanthropists and the market and the retailers and the people that want to move in that will all come together into something like this, and so I mean, I want to get this done and then I want to do another one.

I was reading a blog that was talking about the technology bubble breaking, and what happened to all the people who went out to Silicon Valley. They made a significant amount of money, but then when the bubble burst, they ended up being disbursed around the country again. I think as we go through generations, there are going to be people that are doing that, and so the social value of place. You were talking about your hometown, Ben, and I think back to Painesville and Chardon and all these areas with a town square like Oberlin. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for SCA. Would you go back to your own hometown and say, “Hey, we did this project in Oberlin. Look, there are three acres over there. What can we do with them?”

BE: There’s actually some fascinating stuff going on in my hometown. For instance there’s this old cardboard and paper mill There’s already somebody redeveloping it, but it sits on 50 acres. It’s got a working hydroelectric plant in it that’s just needs a little refurbishing. The people that are working on it right now are turning it into a lot of artist spaces, and their hydro plant is going to produce pure hydrogen, which is apparently very useful in certain types of welding and glass welding, but it’s also really hard and expensive to get your hands on, and so it’s an interesting way to attract artists. A lot of people from New York City are moving up toward this part of Upstate New York, and if you can provide them with free hydrogen for instance, that’s a great way to attract arts as economic development.

Naomi, 10, 20 years, what do you want to be doing?

NS: Six years ago I could have imagined what I am now, so I’m hoping that emerges in a creative way.

JR: To take your question super literally, to set strict plans limits opportunities and limits your vision, as vague as it sounds. We’re open to any challenging, innovative opportunity that comes our way, whether it’s in real estate development or it’s in something totally different that has the same impact that we think real estate development will have on Oberlin in this instance.

NS: I don’t necessarily know whether every single project we do from now on will have the components of housing and economic development and rebuilding. I think those were things that were inspired where Oberlin was at that moment.

If you could challenge Cool Cleveland readers to think about something, what would that be? It could be about anything. It could be about economic development, sustainability… Ben, do you want to start?

BE: Well I was going to start with my question about Oberlin and where independent-minded people and businesses choose to locate themselves. What I’ve seen in Cleveland, is that it can be a very isolating place and a difficult space to find a real community in, and if you’re the type of person who might do well in Oberlin, I could see you having a real tough time finding what you could find here in any neighborhood in Cleveland or anywhere else in Northeast Ohio. So I would challenge people to think about what it might be like to live in Oberlin.

NS: One is that I challenge Cool Cleveland folks to not think of Oberlin as an entirely meager liberal place, that there’s a much more interesting component and dynamic community than just that. My other thing is that I challenge Cool Cleveland readers to think about their lifestyles and their housing choices and their transportation choices and see how those expenditures reflect their values.

JR: I guess my question is for independent retailers interested in opening up the unique locations with a captive audience, which is “Where are you at?” Call us, e-mail us, write us. We need you if we’re not going to fill our building with more boring, dull, soulless chains. And so come out to Oberlin.

NS: There’s a new Chico that wants to come here. (laughter).

JR: Allow us not to call Chico back.

(laughter)

JR: Come out to Oberlin. Don’t just look at like the size of our population. Think about the visitors. Think about our location in Lorain County. This will be the place, at least in Lorain County, that people will go for a unique day trip or unique visit to find things they can’t find anywhere else. You have students, you have professors, you have consumers who will value what you’re offering. And so where’re you at? Call me.

NS: The choir is located here (laughter). Come preach.

JR: Amen.

From Cool Cleveland's Information Officer George Nemeth georgeATcoolcleveland.com

Learn more about Oberlin at Cool Cleveland's Get Lost in Oberlin party on 2/8, with open bar, snacks, self-guided tour, and a free ticket to the production Lost Highway. Get more information here, the get your tickets here.

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