Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 4, 1994 TAG: 9407040073
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
\ Janaka Casper sat in his office recently, musing on a man whose lot in life, though seemingly hard, helped inspire Casper's work today.
Back in 1976, Junior Benjamin lived out on Rock Road near Radford. Benjamin, who was poor and needed work done on his house, looked for help from a handful of volunteers who repaired run-down houses.
Each time they'd go out to Benjamin's, he'd tell them stories, Casper recalled, and the volunteers would marvel at the man's optimism. While the volunteers fixed his roof, put in storm windows and hung siding, Benjamin, though blind, might be cutting up slabs of wood for his stove with a buzz saw.
"You never heard from Junior, `Woe is me,' " Casper said. "I'm convinced that what we did for him is minuscule. We were just kind of learning life from him."
From such building blocks of experience, Casper helped build the foundation for Virginia Mountain Housing, which now goes by VMH Inc.
Back in the 1970s, he and two ragtag volunteer groups winterized homes and did what work they could to ease the housing problems of low-income people. At the time, they looked for financial help from donations, churches and Comprehensive Employment Training Act funds.
Today, the Christiansburg-headquartered VMH Inc. is a statewide organization that builds and manages affordable housing for hundreds of low- and moderate-income individuals and families. It performs emergency home repairs and winterization. And it finds money to help those unable to shelter themselves. Casper is its executive director.
In the world of Virginia's nonprofit housing development corporations, VMH has no equal, some say.
There are other organizations that do work similar to what VMH does - Habitat for Humanity, Arlington Housing Corp., Mountain Shelter Inc., to name a few - but none serves so much of the state or has had a role in as many programs as VMH has over the years.
"They have not viewed themselves with limitations," said Robert Adams, deputy director in charge of housing with the state's Department of Housing and Community Development.
VMH's efforts include Pembroke's S.A. Robinson Apartments, which houses elderly Giles County residents; Richmond's New Clay House, a facility for the homeless, which VMH manages; and the Tekoa Group Home, a controversial facility for troubled youths, which VMH recently began building in Floyd County.
Last year, VMH built five homes in the New River Valley, made emergency repairs to 42 homes, performed weatherization services for 320 families and oversaw the management of hundreds of apartments across the state. For the year, it took in revenue of nearly $5 million, with about $1 million of that coming from federal and state programs in the form of grants, subsidies and loans. It cited assets of nearly $14 million in land, buildings, inventory and other categories.
"Over the last 10 years, I've watched VMH grow," said David Lollis, executive director of the Federation of Appalachian Housing Enterprises Inc., which comprises 20 nonprofit housing corporations from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. "It has grown to be the largest group in the federation."
"I'm aware of what's going on in the whole country," said Lollis. "There's not another nonprofit housing group that is more significant than VMH."
It wasn't always that way.
"For the first five or six years, it just kind of puddled along," said the Rev. Woody Leach, a well-known campus minister and community activist in Blacksburg. He has been on VMH's board of directors since it was meeting in a basement and discussing the main issue: "How can we survive?"
Nonprofit groups constantly struggle to stay alive financially, never possessing all the money they need for their efforts. They often must rely on donations, grants and loans for their projects.
"Where the creativity comes in is in using different sources to make the project work," said Jeff London, a former VMH rehab specialist who now is director of Mountain Shelter Inc., a nonprofit housing corporation serving Wythe, Bland, Carroll and Grayson counties.
"It always takes more than one [source], usually four or five," London said. "It takes generally three years to put a project together. They're good at it."
In the early days, the organization primarily did weatherization and emergency home repair. Then in 1981, it received a $1 million Community Development Block Grant to do rehabs and emergency home repairs in Montgomery County.
In 1985, "we went out of town" and began subcontracting on $1.2 million worth of weatherization projects in Northern Virginia and the New River Valley, Casper said. In 1987, the group undertook an $800,000 project to convert the old Pembroke School into affordable housing for elderly people, and VMH hasn't looked back since.
"That was a major step," Casper said. "That project was viewed as a model. We went from doing $10,000 rehabs to a major project."
A thin, tough-skinned man whose beard is flecked with gray, Casper initially is soft-spoken and reserved, but his words can pierce if he believes an opponent's argument is based on bigotry or selfishness.
VMH has had to deal with such attitudes often, and they are summed up in the acronym, NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard.
"I like NOPE better: Not On Planet Earth," said Karl Bren, who has worked with VMH for years and now serves as director of nonprofit communication with the Virginia Housing Development Authority. "Anywhere you build affordable housing, there's going to be opposition from somebody."
For VMH, that opposition most recently surfaced with preparations to build the Tekoa Group Home. After losing a rezoning appeal in Giles County when residents there opposed the plan, VMH decided to build in Floyd County, which has no zoning laws.
A group of residents protested, saying VMH went about the process too secretively, arguing about the type of children who would be housed there and questioning VMH's experience in child counseling.
Recently an adjacent property owner filed suit against VMH, contesting the property boundaries. No court date has been set, but VMH has denied the suit's allegations and filed a countersuit, claiming that the original suit was filed to derail the project.
Work began last month on the facility, and VMH has formed a separate corporation, headed by Susan Duncan, a certified counselor with 21 years experience, to run the home.
"I think we've struggled with the board more with Tekoa" than other projects, board member Leach said. "We are facilitating something that really seems not [to be] in our area of expertise." But Casper persuaded the board to sign on. "Janaka did a good selling job. He said, `Housing is housing is housing.' "
In Casper's mind, there's no organization more qualified to build the home.
Still, sometimes the corporation must battle bureaucracy.
"Half of what we try, we're turned down on," said Casper, citing a housing project in Hampton Roads that VMH tried to get off the ground for three years before succumbing to funding difficulties. Casper figures VMH had sunk about $80,000 into it for such items as staff time and surveying. But, "when you don't succeed, you've got to learn from that," he said.
For those projects that don't work, however, there are plenty of projects that do succeed.
Since 1979, VMH has rehabilitated 538 apartments, built 70 single-family homes, performed 8,000 weatherizations and more than 900 emergency home repairs.
It owes its success, many say, to Casper's leadership, the organization's penchant for taking risks, the willingness to take on novel projects and, now, as it closes in on two decades of existence, the strength of experience.
"I didn't have a vision in 1976," said Casper, who shuns the spotlight and is quick to credit others.
VMH officials try to fill whatever need they perceive. And Casper said moving out of the New River Valley into areas such as Northern Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater also opened up more possibilities for funding and added some stability to the corporation's ability to pay overhead costs and salaries.
by CNB