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Floridian of the Year: Lift Orlando

In the 1940s, Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood just west of downtown was the city’s largest African-American community and one of the only communities where black people could live under the segregationist laws of the era. By the early 1950s, a shift was underway.

New housing, marketed to black professionals, began cropping up a few miles west of Parramore, and as lending practices changed over the next couple of decades, the neighborhoods tucked in between Orange Blossom Trail (to the east) and John Young Parkway (to the west) grew into a thriving, middle-class black community of three-to five-bedroom, ranch-style houses along tidy, tree-lined streets.

“Basically, the people who lived in our area were educators and business-people,” recalls Shirley Bradley, a retired teacher who moved into the area’s Clear Lake (Bunche Manor/Hollando) subdivision in 1963 when the development was being built. Residents also included doctors, ministers and barrier-breaking public servants: Alzo Reddick, a teacher, grew up in Parramore, built a house in Clear Lake in 1978 and won a seat in the Florida Legislature four years later, becoming Orlando’s first black state representative. Orlando’s first African-American chief judge, Belvin Perry, and retired Navy Vice Adm. David Brewer III (who went on to become superintendent of Los Angeles County schools) also grew up in the neighborhood and now lives there again.

As the years went on, young black professionals who once might have chosen to put down roots in the 32805 ZIP code relocated to Orlando’s suburbs or elsewhere, and parts of the community surrounding Orlando’s Citrus Bowl began to decline.

Nowhere was the decline more evident than at Washington Shores Village, a sprawling, concrete-block apartment complex along Orange Center Boulevard. “It was nice at one point,” says Ronald Jones, who lived there in the 1980s but left after the apartments fell into disrepair under absentee landlords.

By 2013, more than a quarter of the residents living at the Washington Shores apartments were unemployed, the average tenant’s income was $9,235 and crime within the complex was 21 times the national average. “That was the most dangerous place in Orlando — shootings going on, killings going on, all the time,” Jones recalls.

As the neighborhood declined, the city found plenty of money to invest in civic infrastructure, including $207 million for a makeover of the Citrus Bowl (now called Camping World Stadium). Ironically, that makeover exposed some community leaders to conditions they might not otherwise have seen.

Tom Sittema, then CEO of CNL Financial Group, says he had never driven through the area until he and his wife passed through on their way to the Citrus Bowl football game at Camping World Stadium in January 2012. The “abject poverty” astounded him, he says. “The thought occurred to us: The children who are born and raised here, do they even have a chance?” Sittema says. The millions being spent to rehab the stadium made it seem all the more unjust, he says.

Sittema discovered others in the local business community — including Steve Hogan, CEO of Florida Citrus Sports, and attorney William Dymond of the Lowndes law firm — had similar reactions when they saw the neighborhood for the first time and felt the same way about trying to help.

Together, they launched a non-profit called Lift Orlando in 2013. The group’s mission: To leverage the renovation and investment of Camping World Stadium and other strategic investments as catalysts to “break the cycle of poverty” and transform the surrounding community. “We felt, wouldn’t it be cool if this would be one of the first sports and entertainment venues that could literally lift up a region around it? That was the vision,” says Hogan. “Could it be a beating heart? Could it connect at a vascular level to the people that live here? That was the big idea.”

Almost a decade later, the vision of Lift Orlando — which stands for learn, identify, focus and transform — is falling into place.

Lift Orlando’s 2021 milestones included the completion of $18 million in new projects — including the $9-million Jacqueline Bradley & Clarence Otis Family Branch Boys & Girls Club and the $9-million renovation of Lake Lorna Doone Park — and the groundbreaking on a $13.6-million health and wellness center, the cornerstone project of the West Lakes redevelopment effort.

Eddy Moratin, Lift Orlando’s president, says the group has invested more than $100 million in housing, education, health and economic development in the West Lakes neighborhood. About 25%, he says, has come from private donations. Lift has leveraged those donations through financing instruments, including low-income housing tax credits and new market tax credits. In addition, the group received a $4-million, no-interest loan from Dr. Phillips Charities that enabled it to acquire the Washington Shore apartments in 2015.

Today, where the Washington Shores apartments once languished sits Pendana, a fully occupied, mixed-income apartment building equipped with stainless steel appliances, hardwood-style flooring, a fitness center and other amenities. Across the street, a similar building provides 120 units of affordable housing to independent seniors. Nearby, a 16,000-sq.-ft. preschool operated by AdventHealth stands on what used to be a dumping ground littered with tires and abandoned cars. A few blocks away, next to Orange Center Elementary School, local kids and teens play basketball and take ballet lessons at the new Boys & Girls Club, now Central Florida’s largest.

Beyond the aesthetics are measurable signs of economic progress. Child poverty rates in West Lakes are dropping 16 times faster than the county average, and the community’s per capita income rose by $8,000 (from $12,427 to $20,425) between 2014 and 2018. “We actually saw a 65% closure of the gap between incomes in the neighborhood and the Orange County average ($30,855). Ultimately, we want to see that the rate of income match the region, maybe even exceed it one day,” says Moratin. “That’s a very bottom-line definition of what we do.”

Collaboration and “patient capital”

Lift Orlando was inspired in part by the approach that developer Tom Cousins used to transform Atlanta’s East Lake community in the 1990s. Now a national model promoted by the non-profit Purpose Built Communities, it focuses on investments in “cradle-to-career” education, mixed-income housing and wellness, with an overarching non-profit acting as a sort of quarterback for the effort. Lift tweaked the blueprint to add a fourth pillar of long-term economic viability — jobs, opportunities and better wages. “At the end of the day, you want to be in a situation where eventually the areas you’re helping no longer need your assistance,” Sittema says.

A key element in Lift’s approach has been to engage residents in the work of improving the neighborhood.

“Every phase of this work has included intensive collaboration with local residents,” says Bahiyyah Maroon, CEO of the Polis Institute, an Orlando-based community research organization that has coordinated Lift’s outreach efforts.

“That’s the piece of the Lift Orlando story that is so significant and often untold when other communities are looking (at revitalization efforts) and saying, ‘How can we do this work?’ The answer is, are you willing to have community conversations? Are you willing to go out and have community surveys and take the data from the surveys and act on it? Are you willing to slow down the decision-making to empower black and Hispanic residents to be part of the choice process?” she says.

Polis started those conversations in 2013 by training and sending a team of survey researchers — most of whom had lived in the community at one time or another — door to door to find out what the residents loved about their community and what they thought needed changing. Jones, the former resident of Washington Shores and one of Polis’ canvassers, says some residents were hesitant to talk in beginning, but most eventually came around. “They got to know us by our blue Polis shirts and started trusting us more,” he recalls.

The dialogue continued at frequent charrettes attended by both community residents and Lift’s leaders. “That’s when you knew it was different,” recalls Tony Jenkins, the Central Florida region market president for Florida Blue, which is collaborating with Lift on its final capital project in West Lakes, a 30,000-sq.-ft. community health center called Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center. “When these (business) folks showed up with Lift to listen to what the residents were saying, they were all in.”

Until those meetings, the five neighborhoods anchored around four lakes in the 32805 ZIP code didn’t even have an overarching name. Residents came up with one — The Communities of West Lakes — and organized their own group, the West Lakes Partnership, to focus on preserving their cultural heritage and other key priorities, including stable housing, homeownership and better neighborhood amenities.

The conversations that ensued weren’t always pretty. A number of longtime residents initially opposed Lift’s plans to build more apartments instead of single-family homes, which they felt would better boost their property values. Maroon says Lift leaders “negotiated” through those meetings by presenting information on how many lives would be impacted with a mixed-income, multi-family complex (versus single-family homes). Multifamily housing, Lift leaders said, would attract students to boost declining school populations. Eventually, most residents got behind the plan. The process may have required three weeks of debate, Maroon says, but there’s power in what she calls “patient capital” and making sure everyone is afforded a place at the table and a voice in the discussion.

To its credit, Lift has also endeavored to help “legacy residents” return to the neighborhood. Hogan estimates that 60% of the 15,000 applicants who lined up to apply for an opportunity to lease one of Pendana’s 200 units had lived in the neighborhood previously. “They had to qualify, but we worked hard to make sure they were up there in front of the line,” says Hogan.

Rudy Alford’s family was among them. His wife, Tianna, a nurse, who had grown up in Orange Manor (part of same complex as Washington Shores) heard about Pendana by word of mouth and applied right away. They were the third tenants selected and first family to move into building 12. Alford now works as a groundskeeper for Columbia Residential, the company that built and manages the apartment complex, while the couple’s two youngest sons, Carter and Camryn, attend the West Lakes Early Learning Center. “They love it,” says Alford, who has been saving up to buy a home. “I wouldn’t mind having one of the houses in the neighborhood. I wouldn’t mind at all. This is a great neighborhood.

Looking ahead

With 10 years of experience under their belts, Lift’s leaders hope to serve as a resource for other business leaders in Florida and beyond who want to restore neighborhoods experiencing generational poverty.

One key takeaway, Sittema says, is the need for C-suite leaders to roll up their sleeves and get personally involved — not just write a check or delegate to mid-level staff.

Case in point: Lift’s $4-million purchase of the foreclosed property where Pendana now stands would never have happened if Lift’s board hadn’t found a way around Fannie Mae’s plan to sell the property at auction. Ultimately, Lift learned that a governmental entity could buy property from Fannie Mae without having to go to auction. With support from Mayor Buddy Dyer, the city of Orlando purchased the property and resold it to Lift. Sittema says Lift board members such as Dymond, one the state’s top real estate attorneys, and Sandy Hostetter, the Central Florida regional president for Truist bank, were instrumental. “For us it was a complex transaction, a complex problem that needed to be solved, but oh, by the way, that’s kind of what all of us do in our day jobs, so we just kind of collectively figured it out,” Sittema says.

Another key element of Lift’s success — and other efforts that have come before it — is its hyper-local approach. “You can’t do this 30 miles wide. You’ve got to focus, pick your spot,” says Hogan.

Harris Rosen, Orlando’s iconic hotelier, had demonstrated how a focused effort could work when he adopted Orlando’s Tangelo Park neighborhood in the early 1990s. His Tangelo Park Program gave every neighborhood child between ages 2 and 4 access to free preschool and provided parents with parenting classes and vocational training. Every child who graduated from high school and was accepted by a Florida college, university or vocational school would receive a full scholarship covering tuition, books, room and board. Twenty-six years later, high school graduation rates in Tangelo Park are 100%, and 176 kids have completed college or trade school. Crime in the neighborhood is virtually non-existent.

Other state business leaders have hopped aboard the Chamber of Commerce’s Florida Prosperity Initiative, which encourages them to adopt impoverished ZIP codes, identify their needs and find ways to help turn things around. Earlier this year, Forough Hosseini, senior vice president of ICI Homes, launched a Homes Bring Hope Initiative to help low-income renters in Daytona Beach’s 32114 ZIP code buy homes.

Florida Blue’s Jenkins says the health insurance giant is replicating the work it’s been doing with Lift in targeted sections of Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville, where a newly formed group called Lift Jax is spearheading an effort to transform the city’s Eastside neighborhood. “Listen, you can spread this work out so wide that it’s going to take a longer time to scale and get impact. We want to have an immediate impact, focusing on specific ZIP codes,” Jenkins says.

For all the progress in West Lakes, there’s still considerable work to do. The community lacks a grocery store, and business recruitment has been a challenge. Getting a high-end call center or something similar to set up shop in the neighborhood would be the “big, ultimate win,” says Hogan. “We wanted some of that to happen in year one, and it didn’t.”

Lift’s leaders are realistic about the time it will take to move the needle on other fronts. Crime rates, for instance, have risen and fallen, but as of 2019 were still twice as high as the rest of the city. The community continues to lag Orange County on employment.

Education is another tough nut to crack. While kindergarten readiness has improved 12% since 2015, and high school graduation rates are up 17%, fewer than 50% of children in West Lakes public schools are performing at grade level. “We want to always acknowledge that there’s great movement going on, but there’s enormous complexity to the work,” says Moratin, Lift’s president.

Polis’ Maroon cautions against getting hung up on the numbers. “You can get great numbers when you gentrify a neighborhood. I can assure you, you’ll see remarkable numbers — low unemployment rates, a white-collar workforce — but when you look at who’s at the table, it’s not going to be Hispanic people at the table or African-Americans,” Maroon says. Unlike what’s going on in West Lakes, “those are stories of investments without a community voice.”

KEY PROJECTS

HOUSING

  • Pendana at West Lakes ($40 million)

The mixed-income complex includes 140 units for tenants earning 60% of the area median income or less, 40 market-rate apartments and 20 designated for extremely low-income tenants. When Lift Orlando began accepting applications for Pendana’s 200 units in 2018, nearly 15,000 people got in line. “It was like the lines at Disney. People would bring lawn chairs and literally wait in lines wrapped around the leasing office to order to make out applications to live there,” recalls Tom Sittema, one of Lift Orlando’s founders.

  • Pendana at West Lakes Senior Residences ($25 million)

Designed for residents 62 years and older, the three-story building (which opened in 2020) has its own movie theater, computer center and fitness center. Ninety percent of residents are low-income tenants, and 10% of the units are reserved for very low-income individuals and set aside for use in partnership with the city of Orlando for the chronically homeless.

CHILD CARE / EDUCATION

  • West Lakes Early Learning Center ($8.3 million)

Owned and operated by AdventHealth, the ELC provides early childhood education and preschool services for children from 6 weeks to 5 years old. The ELC follows a blended curriculum based on Primrose Schools’ Balanced Learning approach and AdventHealth’s “CREATION Life” principles, which emphasize choice, rest, environment, activity, trust in God, interpersonal relationships, outlook and nutrition. There is also a physician’s assistant onsite, so parents don’t have to miss work if their child is ill. Now in its second school year, the ELC has 141 enrolled students. Approximately three dozen kids are from West Lakes and 22 live in Pendana, and many are the sons and daughters of employees of AdventHealth.

  • Jacqueline Bradley & Clarence Otis Family Branch of Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida ($9.4 million)

Named after retired Darden Restaurants CEO Clarence Otis and his wife, Jacqueline Bradley, who donated $4 million to the project, the two-story club — with design elements inspired by the exclusive Alaqua Country Club in Longwood — features a dance studio, commercial kitchen, fullsize gymnasium with a stage for performances, tech and STEM labs, a college and career center and more. The 30,000-sq.-ft. facility, which opened in March, can accommodate up to 250 children (ages 6 to 18) at no cost to their families.

HEALTH & WELLNESS

  • Lake Lorna Doone Park($9 million)

When the Polis Institute surveyed residents of West Lakes about their concerns in late 2013, the Lake Lorna Doone city park was near the top of their list. In 1955, the park (located just north of Camping World Stadium) hosted the South’s first racially integrated Little League baseball game, but 60 years later, it became a popular spot for homeless people and drug activity, causing many families to shy away. More than two dozen residents participated in the redesign process, and Lake Lorna Doone reopened last summer with $9 million in upgrades, including a splash pad, basketball courts and a miniature golf course inspired by the back nine at Bay Hill.

  • Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center ($13.6 million)

Doctors are scarce in the West Lakes community, and many residents are uninsured, pushing them into local hospital emergency rooms when they are sick. To improve access to care, Lift and its partners — Orlando Health, AdventHealth and Florida Blue — are collaborating on the development of a 30,000-sq.- ft. facility that will provide convenient access to affordable health care, including obstetrics, pediatrics, urgent care and family practitioners. Community Health Centers, which operates 15 family health centers in Central Florida, will operate the clinic component. The building, slated for completion next year, will feature community meeting space, a cafe, a fitness center and study and co-working space. It will also provide a home for the West Lakes Financial Wellbeing Center, which (with $1.2 million from the Truist Foundation) provides free workshops, one-on-one financial coaching and job placement services to residents of the 32805 ZIP code. Florida Blue plans to provide residents with help navigating the health care system. “Through this center, we want to be able to direct people to not only where they can get the right care, but the most affordable places that they can get care, and a lot of folks sometimes are going to emergency rooms for situations and incidents that are not emergencies, such as headaches,” says Tony Jenkins, Central Florida market president for Florida Blue. “But again without the availability or ability to get in front of a physician, that’s the only choice that they have. This center will help solve some of that.”

NOTABLES

JEFF VINIK

A Wall Street legend who once ran the $50-billion Fidelity Magellan Fund, Jeff Vinik came to Tampa in 2010 after purchasing the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team. A decade later, the Lightning have won back-to-back Stanley Cups (2020 and 2021) and Vinik’s $3.5-billion, 56-acre Water Street Tampa project — a joint venture with Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment — is transforming a section of downtown Tampa near Amalie Arena into a bustling mini-city of its own with several new apartment buildings, two new hotels, high-rise office space and an entertainment hub called Sparkman Wharf. Water Street is the world’s first WELL-certified community, with walkability, air quality, water quality and other wellness features built into the design. The neighborhood’s focus on wellness proved prescient amid the COVID-19 pandemic, driving tenant and resident interest into “hyperdrive,” Vinik told CNBC in an interview earlier this year.

TOM BRADY

Super Bowl LV wasn’t just any game. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 31-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs earned veteran quarterback Tom Brady his seventh championship ring — an NFL record — and it was the first time any team played (and won) a Super Bowl in its hometown. Bucs’ fans celebrated in Tampa Bay fashion, with a boat parade down the Hillsborough River that will be best remembered for Brady tossing the Lombardi Trophy from his boat to another. Now in his 23rd NFL season, Brady, the so-called GOAT (greatest of all time), will earn more than $41 million playing for the Bucs this season and has shown no signs of slowing down. “Hopefully, I’ll be here a long time. For many years,” he recently told the Tampa Bay Times.

SYD KITSON

When Syd Kitson purchased the 91,000-acre Babcock Ranch in Southwest Florida in 2006, he sold 73,000 acres in Charlotte and Lee counties back to the state for preservation — the largest preservation land deal in state history. He planned to develop about half of the acreage he kept. His vision: The nation’s first ever solar-powered town. While the subsequent housing market bust and recession slowed his plans, they didn’t stop him — and 15 years later, Kitson’s vision is becoming a reality. The community recently surpassed 1,500 homes sold and is harnessing the power of the sun via a deal with FPL, which put a 75-megawatt solar field on 870 acres on the north end of the Babcock Ranch property. Commercial buildings in the business area are topped with solar panels. With other eco-conscious features — including community gardens and plans for all-electric driverless mobility system — Babcock Ranch is on its way to becoming the nation’s first self-sustaining city.

THE FLORIDA MANATEE

Five years ago, the Florida manatee was doing well enough that it was reclassified from an endangered to a threatened species — but 2021 proved catastrophic for the sea cow, with 968 manatee deaths counted through the beginning of October. Of the 397 mammals necropsied, 18 had succumbed to cold stress, 86 were killed by watercraft and 141 perished from natural causes, which include diseases, birth complications, accidents and natural catastrophes, such as red tide blooms. One-third of the deaths occurred in Brevard County’s Indian River Lagoon, where harmful algae blooms decimated the sea grass, the mainstay of the manatee diet. Another dozen died from human-related causes or being crushed or suffocated in flood gates and canal locks.

 

Read more in Florida Trend's December issue.
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