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Floridian of the Year: Lift Orlando
Non-profit Lift Orlando is revitalizing a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood around Camping World Stadium
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.
