Founders of a Colorado Springs nonprofit, which for 40 years has provided low-income housing for the poor, the homeless, immigrants and released inmates, object to current leaders' new strategy that reportedly has resulted in higher rents and evictions.
“They’re evicting people and selling the land to flippers who are buying the lots below market value, fixing them up, and in some cases, charging $1,500 a month to rent, when it had been $500,” said Steve Handen, one of five charter members who formed Ithaka Land Trust in 1981.
Officials of what’s now called Ithaka Land say they are considering using an estimated $3 million generated from property sales to build a large-scale transitional housing complex with related support programs.
Steve Handen straightens the fencing at a columbarium for the homeless. Handen is a former Catholic priest who started Colorado Springs first soup kitchen, is the founder of a columbarium, where the ashes of those who died on the streets are buried. But the property the columbarium sits on has been sold, over the objections of the group of people known as the Bijou Community who started it. Every year, a longest night memorial service is held at the site. (Photo by Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette)
“The deferred maintenance on these turn-of-the-century properties and the impact of COVID-19 forced us to shift our strategic priority,” said Anjuli Kapoor, who became Ithaka’s CEO in 2017.
The new direction, first reported by the Colorado Springs Independent, will enable the organization to stabilize operations and sustain its future, she said.
Of it's 21 property holdings, Ithaka has sold five homes that had been rented out as permanent affordable housing, has another sale pending and also parted with a vacant lot.
Denver developer Blue Truck Capital bought four properties in October, which the company is leasing back to Ithaka for two years.
Kapoor said retaining management of those homes gives the organization time to help existing tenants find new places to live.
About $1 million in sales proceeds enabled the organization to “reduce capacity and increase resources and the ability to serve our community.”
Another $1.05 million went toward securing an interest in a potential location for a transitional housing complex on the campus of the former county health department at 301 S. Union Blvd.
If the organization moves forward with that idea, eight of the 10 remaining Ithaka properties will be liquidated.
“For three and a half years, we’ve worked to salvage the properties,” Kapoor said, “and we don’t have the capital to do that.”
'Dirt we can sell'
Ithaka’s original charter was “to hold land in perpetuity for the service of the poor in El Paso County,” said Handen, who in 1970 started the city’s first soup kitchen out of his home and went on to create affordable housing projects, and help felons and addicts regain their lives.
One benefit of that is to “build a buffer to gentrification that’s now going on,” he said.
A collection of memorial items have been left at a columbarium represents the homeless people whose ashes are at the site.
Over the years, Ithaka acquired homes in low-income neighborhoods around the downtown core, using donations, bequests, loans and rent from tenants to pay off the mortgages.
Ithaka also owns multifamily housing, including The Rectory, a former church rehabbed into apartments, and The Shore House for homeless men and women. Those are the properties the organization intends to keep.
The real estate had been well-groomed for years, Handen said, largely because the organization had no paid employees for the two decades he ran it, so revenue went to the houses, not salaries.
But in the last 20 years, sewer lines, roofs, siding, foundations, paint, flooring, landscaping and appliances have fallen into disrepair.
Ithaka was on the verge of launching a fundraising campaign to cover maintenance costs of $15,000 to $40,000 for each of its properties when the pandemic started last spring, Kapoor said.
The organization then decided to sell nearly all its housing stock, with a goal of building a new transitional housing center that would help 450 families over the next 60 years.
Adding more transitional housing is one of the city's goals, said Steve Posey, HUD program manager for Colorado Springs.
"We have a lot of folks who seem to be stuck in shelters, they've had a tough setback with a medical issue, addiction or coming out of a correctional facility, and it's unrealistic to expect them to go out and rent an apartment on their own," he said.
"We need more housing options, and these individuals do better when they live in small groups with people who have the same issues and can support each other."
Handen, who left Ithaka in 2000, said the numbers don’t add up to justify selling the properties to obtain the millions needed to build a complex.
“The pope calls that ‘predatory capitalism,’ where the history of the people and the neighborhood are irrelevant, but we’ve got this dirt we can sell for a profit,” said Handen, a former Catholic priest.
They've 'begun to evict people'
Handen thinks Ithaka is abdicating its mission and violating the charitable intent of donors.
Kapoor disagrees.
The organization in 2019 changed its mission to supply transitional housing and not permanent affordable housing, she said.
Transitional housing focuses on “bringing people out of poverty into community and self-sufficiency over a period of time with support, because as we know through research and experience, it's a support system that prevents homelessness,” Kapoor said.
The organization dropped the word “Trust” from its name to reflect that what had been a community land trust model ceased to exist.
“Ithaka still remains well within the bounds of its articles of incorporation,” Kapoor said. “We’re using the current assets to replace the properties and continue to serve the low-income population.”
Ithaka is managing some of the properties Blue Truck Capital now owns, to help allow time for tenants to relocate, including possibly other Ithaka properties, Kapoor said.
Handen and some tenants dispute that.
“The current administration has begun to evict people,” Handen said. “They say they’re finding them homes, but that’s not true, in many cases.”
Anjelica, a motel maid who asked that her last name not be used, has lived in one of Ithaka’s houses in the Hillside neighborhood for 27 years. She said she was shocked when she found out in December that she and her 17-year-old son, who has Down syndrome, would have to move by June 1.
She pays $433 a month in rent and during the pandemic has had her cleaning work reduced to two hours a day, seven days a week.
“It’s so bad. I say, ‘What am I going to do?’” Anjelica said, crying. “I have my disabled son. If it was only me. But it’s him, too, and here he’s protected with a yard and fence.”
Anjelica said she’s been told they might be able to put her in another Ithaka house, but she fears she will become homeless.
“They tell me they have better projects to grow,” she said. “I don’t understand why they want to kick me out to rent to someone else.”
Weighing whether to move forward
Ithaka residents living in the permanent affordable housing units will be able to live in the future one-stop transitional housing center, Kapoor said.
But that won't be built until fall of 2022 at the earliest.
“We see a lot of potential benefits for the families living in the new Ithaka campus,” said Zach McComsey, who runs the Legacy Institute, which funds projects that improve life in Colorado Springs.
“It’s a great location with a breathtaking view of Pikes Peak, right next to amenities of the lake, the park, the YMCA, the skate park, the ball fields and right next door to a Peak Vista health clinic,” he said.
A nonprofit called Hillside Community Preparatory School purchased the nearly 9-acre campus at 301-305 S. Union Blvd. in October for $2.5 million, with Ithaka loaning $1.05 million to the project, McComsey said.
Legacy Institute loaned $350,000, and a group called Colorado Charter Facilities Solutions in Denver, which helps new charter schools establish facilities, loaned $1.1 million.
“The campus has been sitting as a giant piece of blight on the edge of the Hillside neighborhood for almost a decade since the county left,” McComsey said.
After gaining city approval to change the use of the property, the land will be divided up between the three entities, he said.
Legacy is eyeing setting up a new charter school and other education and community-oriented projects. Blue Truck has condos, apartments and mixed-use development in mind, but nothing has been finalized.
Ithaka is weighing whether to move forward with building the transitional housing megaplex.
The three parties came together by happenstance last summer and have formed a “productive and supportive relationship,” McComsey said.
“I have found everyone on Ithaka's team and the guys from Blue Truck thoughtful, honest and transparent,” he said. “They’ve put a lot of work and at times agonizing consideration into trying to figure out how to maintain good housing for their residents over the long term.”
Drew Gaiser, managing partner of Blue Truck Capital, said in an email he understands that when people hear the word “development,” they envision “a loss of affordability" and "change that may not be for the better.”
“One of the biggest reasons we are excited about our partnership with Ithaka and Hillside is that we get to challenge that assumption by working to develop in a collaborative way,” he said.
Kapoor believes the route to end homelessness is through such public-private partnerships.
Handen and some Ithaka residents are critical, saying the changes have been secretive, and the organization’s leadership does not respond to their concerns.
“It’s certainly not what the people of the last 40 years have worked for,” Handen said.
Kapoor said she’s “not the evil CEO out to hoard money.”
“If I was doing half the things I’m being accused of, I’d be long gone,” she said. “We’ve been building relationships for the benefit of the community.”
The founder's lament
Handen is receiving treatment for cancer, and the prognosis is not good, he said. At 81, the situation with the organization he started decades ago, but now barely recognizes, weighs heavily on his mind.
Among the possible casualties of new development is a columbarium for people who died homeless.
Handen and the Ithaka founders, who are known as the Bijou Community, started the natural burial site more than 30 years ago.
“I never thought in the last days of my life on Earth, we’d be advocating not just for the living, but also for the dead,” he said.
Located behind a house on West Bijou Street, which Ithaka sold to Blue Truck last fall, a wall made of stones gathered from areas along creeks and bridges where homeless people have died forms a crescent moon around the sacred ground.
Amid the plastic flowers, religious statues and memorabilia are buried their cremains, as well as others, including the Handens' first grandchild, who died by miscarriage. Ashes of the mother of a son Handen and his wife adopted also are there.
But the columbarium may have to be relocated.
Kapoor said Ithaka has been working with the Bijou Community to move it to “a much more visible place that would bring integrity to the plight of the homeless and get it out in front our office with a memorial.”
Ithaka would contribute $5,000, and Blue Truck has committed $5,000 for its relocation, she said.
The Bijou Community sent a letter last week to Ithaka requesting that the house and side yard where the columbarium is — which was the initial purchase that launched Ithaka — be donated to the group until members can no longer care for it. Then, it would revert to Ithaka.
Handen said he hadn’t received a response.
Negotiations are ongoing, Kapoor said, with the request of gifting the property to the Bijou Community now on the table.
“It’s definitely a consideration; we’re open to all possibilities,” Kapoor said. “We want to meet the community needs, whatever that looks like and in whatever ways.”
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