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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Andrew Tellijohn
August 2004

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Mission style


Mission style

by Burl Gilyard   Everybody knows the Archie Givens’ name, it seems, and they knew it before he even knew himself. His father, Archie Givens Sr., is remembered as a hard-driving businessman and a trailblazing African-American entrepreneur in Minnesota.

“My father was a very typical entrepreneur. ‘Typical’ meaning driven and hard-working and visionary, if you will,” says Archie Givens Jr. “He had a series of little businesses along the way: an ice cream parlor in North Minneapolis. It was Givens Ice Cream Bar, on Sixth and Lyndale.”

The elder Givens was involved in numerous ventures, including housing and long-term health care. Givens Sr. founded the Willows Convalescent Centers, and built a network of nursing homes in the area.

“He kept starting [businesses] and moving along. Being an entrepreneur is not easy anyway. Being an African-American entrepreneur in those days was even more difficult, in terms of just access to capital and all the things you need to really get moving. But he was fortunate to be able to navigate through that process,” says Givens.

As a younger man, Givens had dreamed of doing anything but working in the family business. He earned a master’s degree in hospital administration from the University of Minnesota and worked with Hennepin County to establish community-based health clinics. But today he sits in an office in a building originally conceived and developed by his father.

The company was founded in 1970 as the Rainbow Development Corp. The 264-unit senior housing facility, the Yorktown Continental Apartments, which sits not too far from the Southdale mall, was the first-ever subsidized housing facility in Edina when it opened three decades ago.

Givens, 59, has served as CEO of the company now known as Legacy Management & Development Corp. since 1996. Per Givens, the firm had revenue of $10 million in 2003 with some 1,200 rental housing units under management. Over the years, the company has developed the bulk of those units.

The company’s core business is developing and managing affordable housing units. Under the direction of Givens, the company is tackling some of its largest projects to date, including developing the rental housing component of the expansive, $225-million Heritage Park redevelopment project in north Minneapolis.

Recalling the firm’s revenue of three decades ago, Givens chuckles. “It was marginal, I’ll tell you that.”

Archie Givens Sr. died in March 1974 at what Givens calls “a very young 54” of a heart attack.

Where his father was hard-driving, Givens is laid-back. “I think he set the bar up there to strive in terms of expectations, but personally, I didn’t feel the need to compete against it or with him,” says Givens. But Givens clearly believes in carrying on the family legacy.

The Heritage Park project has marked a new chapter for Legacy Development. It’s easily the largest, most complicated deal that the company has been involved in.

The project had an unlikely genesis: a lawsuit. In 1992, Legal Aid and the local NAACP sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on behalf of public housing residents on the city’s near north side, charging that public agencies had racially concentrated residents in that area. The 1995 settlement of the suit called for razing and replacing the existing 770 units of public housing on the site.

Although the project would include an affordable housing component, Heritage Park was substantially larger than anything Legacy had previously undertaken. It was clear to Givens that if he wanted a piece of this deal, he would need to find a larger partner.

“One of the things I really believe in is partnerships and collaborations and I looked around to see who was the most successful at doing this kind of mixed-used development, but also someone who had the same sense of values,” says Givens.

As he surveyed the landscape, Givens settled on trying to forge a partnership with the St. Louis-based McCormack Baron Salazar Inc., nationally recognized as an urban developer.

“It seemed like a natural opportunity to work with a national leader in a true partnership way,” says Givens. “We wouldn’t have had the experience or the capacity to deal with it. You’ve got to know your weaknesses.” The city tapped the McCormack Baron team for the project in 1999.

The project has been far from easy, marked by numerous delays and fractious political bickering. Some have criticized the market-rate housing component of the project as being beyond the reach of residents that the lawsuit was intended to help. Construction didn’t begin until the fall of 2000 — and isn’t slated to be fully finished until 2009.

“It’s been a long process. It’s been very politically charged,” says Givens. “I think it’s politically charged because it came about because of a lawsuit. And it involved tearing down public housing units that some people thought were still habitable and provided shelter and housing for low-income people who needed it.

“All those politics were on the table when we got involved. And I think there was a common feeling that people who lived there wouldn’t be able to return, people who lived in the community wouldn’t have access to it, couldn’t afford it, and it was just going to be another sort of gentrification issue. And it’s proven to be just the opposite of all those things, in my opinion.”

Ultimately, Heritage Park will include a total of 900 housing units. Legacy has partnered with McCormack Baron to develop the 440 rental units in the project, which will also include 360 for-sale units and 100 units of senior housing. Givens puts the total cost of the rental units at $80 million. “We’re currently in phase two of the rental housing, we’ve got about 200 of the units completed and rented,” says Givens.

“All of the market rate units are gone, rented already, that are up in this first phase. So the market has accepted it, people are not nervous about living next to people who are considered public housing residents,” says Givens. “The units are indistinguishable from each other. They’re all built to market quality. And people are very much wanting to be there, because I think the location’s great too.”

Givens’ partners offer high praise for his work.

“Archie’s been a real solid source of strength for all of us, to stay focused in getting Heritage Park completed,” says Richard Baron, co-founder, chairman and CEO of McCormack Baron Salazar. “We have a terrific partnership and he’s someone who I’ve grown to count as a really good friend and partner. He’s an outstanding individual and he’s a wonderful leader in Minneapolis and someone I think the community should be very proud of. He’s just a wonderful guy.”

Baron acknowledges that Givens employs what could be described as a laid-back style in business. “That’s Archie’s style. Archie’s a very determined fellow and he’s a very committed guy, and he has a way of making his points. He has a wonderful set of relationships in Minneapolis. I think he knows what he can do and people respect him for that,” says Baron. “You don’t need to be aggressive and loud in order to be effective, and Archie’s been very effective.”

Givens is proud of the new footing that the project has offered to Legacy. “This McCormack and Legacy partnership has been very successful in terms of really helping us grow, helping us get some recognition in the development world for this type of housing,” says Givens. “Heritage Park has really been, I think, very successful. It’s the largest urban development in the city in the last 50 years.”

The business of developing and managing affordable housing is hardly your average business.

Legacy Development is a for-profit company, but the company’s business demands that it partner with a host of government agencies and nonprofit groups. Affordable housing is by definition subsidized housing. Making the economics work is often a complicated dance.

“When we put a deal together now, we could have up to ten different sources of financing. That’s what makes it very complicated,” says Givens. “That’s because in order to maintain long-term affordability, it requires many financial partners.”

Givens clearly savors the financial intricacies of assembling a deal and making it work. “We get money from the state of Minnesota, for example. The MHFA, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, will give us money that will allow us to sell tax credits. We sell tax credits to investors who will for every dollar they invest get some tax break, so it’s a good investment for them,” says Givens. “We get money from Housing and Urban Development, in terms of underwriting the mortgage. We get monies from the Family Housing Fund; we’ll get money from the city in terms of bonds or other particular grants.”

Affordable housing rents are based on formulas whereby residents pay a certain percentage of their income. “We’re constantly fighting against what it costs to develop and build, and what we want to keep the rents at over the long term,” says Givens.

Legacy’s shift into housing became more profound when it got out of the nursing home business. “We got out of the long-term care business in the mid-’80s. It was starting to become extremely regulated,” says Givens. “Narrow, narrow, narrow profit margins, and it was more and more difficult for a for-profit company to survive in that world.”

For years, Archie’s sister Roxanne Givens Copeland was in charge of Legacy. She says that she left when she began to grow weary of the politicization of affordable housing. Today, Givens Copeland serves as President/CEO of EthnicHome, a design/consulting firm that she founded in 1999.

She admits that her style differs from that of her brother. “Archie is perhaps a lot more laid-back, which is a good thing, which is a healthy thing. His style is very effective,” says Givens Copeland. “I, on the other hand, always seemed to kick it up a notch. It may be as effective, but it certainly takes a greater toll. I think Archie’s style is much better.”

But, she says, that the pair shares an important lesson gleaned from their larger-than-life father. “There was no such thing as ‘No.’ The word ‘no’ did not exist in his vocabulary, and as a consequence it didn’t exist in ours.” Today, Givens Copeland says that Legacy “under Archie’s leadership has grown by leaps and bounds.”

Givens’ longtime friend and sometime business partner Cornell Moore, a partner at the Minneapolis-based Dorsey & Whitney law firm, says that his friend has always had a deep sense of civic values.

“Archie’s been a guy that you could count on over the years to do the right thing, he’s always been pretty progressive,” says Moore. “Making good by doing good.”

In some regards, the Givens name is known more in nonprofit circles than in the business arena. Givens also serves as president of the board for the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. It counts poet Rita Dove and mystery novelist Walter Mosley among its advisers.

The nonprofit began as a minority scholarship fund started by his parents, but the focus shifted when the University of Minnesota approached the Givens family to ask if they could help acquire a collection of rare, first edition African-American literature. The 2,400-volume collection housed at the University is officially known as the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of American Literature. “It’s probably one of the top four collections of its kind in the country,” says Givens.

In both the nonprofit and for-profit realms, Givens is driven by a sense of mission. For Givens, there’s not much point to being in business without having a mission to serve the community. “It’s a company value,” says Givens. “It’s something that we hold close to our hearts.”

While Heritage Park remains in progress, Legacy is keeping busy with new projects and is looking to grow its management portfolio.

Legacy partnered with the nonprofit Selby Area Community Development Corp. Inc., to develop a 40-unit apartment complex at the intersection of Selby Avenue and Grotto Street in St. Paul. Forty percent of the units are designated as affordable. The $6.1 million project opens in August.

“We’re a small community development corporation,” says Stacey Millett, executive director of the Selby Area CDC. “I approached Legacy Management & Development because they seemed like the kind of company that shared some of our values. Legacy has always held a core value that we do: that you try to listen to what the community would like to see.”

Meanwhile, Legacy is planning to break ground in September on a new project at the once-notorious intersection of Dale and University in St. Paul. The project calls for 103 units of mixed-income housing, and a 32,000-square-foot branch of the St. Paul Public Library. Givens says that the project budget tops $20 million. “It will be a signature development for that corner, which is important for the neighborhood and the city,” says Givens.

Legacy will manage both St. Paul projects, which fits with Givens’ plan for continuing to grow the company.

“We’re definitely growing management-wise, and the number of projects under development,” says Givens. “Strategically, we’d like to grow our management portfolio a little bit. We haven’t set a goal for how large we want to be yet.”

[contact]
Richard Baron, McCormack Baron Salazar Inc.
: 314.621.3400; www.mba-development.com. Roxanne Givens Copeland, EthnicHome: www.ethnichome.com. Archie Givens Jr., Legacy Management & Development Corp.: 952.831.1448. Stacey Millett, Selby Area Community Development Corp.: 651.291.7704; www.selbyareacdc.org. Cornell L. Moore, Dorsey & Whitney: 612.340.2600; www.dorsey.com.