Minority Developers Build Up Their Skills at USC
 
Los Angeles Times
By Roger Vincent, Times Staff Writer

Real estate: Intensive summer course teaches students how to convert neglected urban properties to better use.

 
Few Southern California home builders have evicted squatters or knocked down methamphetamine labs as part of the job. The men who created Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley after World War II, for instance, carved housing tracts out of wholesome ranchland as curious sheepherders looked on. Half a century later a developer determined to build another housing tract on an abandoned patch of the Valley’s prototypic suburb had to face down squatters, motorcycle gang drug dealers and a host of regulatory hurdles that never troubled the GI Generation. Yet those challenges are typical of what developers who want to reclaim urban land must face, said Carlos Mesa, who took back that piece of Panorama City and recently built 15 single-family homes that sold for as much as $268,000 each.

 
The buyers who will move in this month are beneficiaries of an intensive summer course at USC that teaches minority developers the rules of the real estate game, said Mesa, a 1993 graduate of the class and president of Santa Fe Group of Los Angeles.

“Plenty of builders today focus on fringes of suburbia,” Mesa said. “ A program like this allows people to go work on small pieces of property in the inner city and convert them to higher use.”

Better uses for stagnating or troubled urban land is exactly what USC’s Minority Program in Real Estate was created to accomplish. The L.A. riots of 1992 gave birth to several well-intentioned nonprofit developers who often lacked the skills to implement their aspirations, said Stuart Gabriel, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. So the Minority Program was kicked off the following year to give would-be builders some street smarts in the unforgiving arena of real estate finance and working knowledge of such arcana as cap rates, valuation and pro formas. It also gives them a foot in the door of a clannish industry in which the right contacts can make or break a deal.

“If you build it they will come,” said student Henry Casillas, who hopes to develop affordable housing in Ventura County. “But you have to do market analysis and run the statistics.”   Continue »

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