For two years, the bulky gray church at the corner of Walbridge Avenue and Broadway Street has stood as an uplifting symbol for thousands of Toledoans crushed by the South End’s decline.

But this will likely change by the end of the year, when Cherry Street Mission’s lease expires with Moawad Ball Holdings, LLC, the firm that purchased the building in 2006.

The firm bought the building at 1411 Broadway  St. for $140,000 but has since put as much as $15,000 into the property and has accumulated debt in mortgage and taxes, said William Lowry of the Moawad Group, which operates Moawad Ball Holdings.

The company recently paid off property taxes for the building, after going from 2009 to 2012 without paying any, according to the Auditor’s Real Estate Information System (AREIS).

Pastor called ‘joker’

The South Toledo Community Center has operated out of thIs church on Broadway Street for two years, but will need to find a new home by the end of the year.

The South Toledo Community Center, which is run from the church, partners with Cherry Street Mission. The mission pays the rent and Pastor David Kaiser and his wife Kelly of Western Avenue Ministries operate the programs for low-income neighbors and the church services.

Rent costs $1,500 a month and Dan Rogers, president and CEO of Cherry Street Mission, said operating the outreach ministry would be more affordable if the partnership could buy its own building. Kaiser offered to buy the property  for what Moawad Ball Holdings paid for it in 2006.

Lowry called Kaiser a “joker.”

“I’ll be darned if I’m going to put more money into his pockets,” Lowry said. He said the firm already subsidizes $1,000 a month of Cherry Street Mission’s rent. The mortgage costs $2,500 a month. Between the mortgage, the debts and the investment pumped into the building, Kaiser was told he would need $384,000 to purchase it.

That’s just not doable, Kaiser said.

“The fundamental thing is that they bought the building in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble,” Kaiser said. “It feels like greed.”

The building, with its dated infrastructure, has needed a lot of work throughout the years. When asked why the firm owns the building, Lowry said,“Stupidity.”

Different approach

Sam Moawad of Moawad Ball Holdings has a different approach. Moawad bought the building when a church came to him asking for help finding a place to locate.

“We like to get involved in ministries,” Moawad said. “We’ve been involved in the community and we know the cash flow and the economy is hard for everybody.”

He also owns a smaller church on Western Avenue that he bought for $22,500 in 2005. Lowry said at least $60,000 in repairs went into that building. Moawad said his company has borrowed money to subsidize much of Cherry Street Mission’s building expenses for the church because the mission does great work for the community.

A new real estate sign stands in the building’s front lawn. Moawad said if he sells the place he wants to sell it to another church group.

David Kaiser

Parenting classes have coached almost 130 moms and dads — as young as 14 years old — about discipline, self worth and gearing their kids toward college.  Another program has offered hours to at least 60 welfare recipients to clean and cook, so they can meet the government-mandated work requirements to receive cash assistance.

The kitchen sent groceries home to at least 10,000 households last year. On average, the South Toledo Community Center serves 167 meals a day.

Outreach workers have knocked on countless doors to connect struggling Toledoans to aid services. Spanish-speaking workers have hit up the Hispanic neighborhoods, helping to bridge the language barrier between service providers and Toledoans who speak little English.

Talk of a free clinic in the second story had evolved into more concrete plans just last month, with a handful of doctors meeting to discuss logistics and equipment needs. Kaiser had also intended to set up a day care in partnership with the YMCA.

“But our hopes to transform the South End are in limbo,” Kaiser said. “At the end of this year, we’re going to have sort of nowhere to go.”

Kaiser has a few options. The nearby Queen of Apostles offered to host the parenting courses and church services, but Kaiser said he fears that numbers will dwindle without the soup kitchen and food pantry.

Other buildings that might seem like options are older and mostly dilapidated. Kaiser was considering the La Garza building but repair costs could be immense. The block of brick buildings surrounding La Garza was constructed when Abraham Lincoln was president, Kaiser said.

Up in the air

As for the free clinic? The day care? It’s all up in the air for now.

“These ideas have been in the brew for so long and I’m so confident with every closed door, a door will open,” Rogers said.

The top priority is to keep services long-term — to implement a 12-to-15-year plan so that the outreach can cut through generations of poverty. The partnership between Kaiser and the mission will continue, Rogers said.

‘I’m going to be lost’

Gege Sprague depends on it continuing. But she has a weak knee and no car — and if the church moves too far she’ll have to stop going. Sprague, 52, lives down the street and her morning routine every day for the past two years has included breakfast from the soup kitchen.

“Whenever this church is open, I’m here,” she said. “If they take this away from me I’m going to rot — I’m going to be lost.”

Baby University, the parenting class, has educated her niece and her son. She eats many suppers at the soup kitchen and attends every church service she can. In a life challenged by two deaths — her son and spouse — and the subsequent years of working two jobs to support her three other kids, Sprague finds solace and healing behind the Broadway Street building’s doors, she said.

Kaiser said many of his attendees face a similar plight: They don’t have transportation. Making it a mile down the road on foot often hinders people in the neighborhood from making medical appointments or getting to the drug store, he said.

“If the new place is not within walking distance, I’m going to have to say goodbye,” Sprague said.

Tags: Cherry Street Mission, Dan Rogers, David Kaiser, Kelly Kaiser, Moawad Ball Holdings, South Toledo Community Center

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2012 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Community, Development.
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Forbes magazine recently placed Toledo on its list of “America’s most miserable cities.” A recent visit to the South Toledo neighborhood where I lived during my high school years shows Forbes doesn’t know what it is talking about; “miserable” does not begin to describe some of South Toledo’s blighted and abandoned areas.

“Wretched” might. “Hellish” might.

Describing parts of South Toledo as “miserable” is like characterizing a gaping, hemorrhaging chest wound as “unpleasant.”

As soon as one leaves Downtown Toledo and drives west on Summit Street, the decay is evident. The street that connects Downtown to Broadway Street looks like it was shelled by German airplanes during World War II and left to sink into the earth. It is shameful that the main eastern artery into Downtown’s riverfront area is a first impression wreck of pitted, dangerous potholes and crumbled asphalt.

Perhaps Mayor Mike Bell’s recently approved plan to fix local roads will start with the gateway to Downtown.

The Broadway Street stretch to South Avenue and a bit beyond features closed and boarded businesses, four semi-demolished schools and a shuttered library.

When did South Toledo turn into Gotham City?

Haunted and rotting

The area was not a thriving paradise when I lived there in the mid-1980s, but I was able to walk to the grocery store, library or laundromat without feeling like I was creeping through Mumbai. Today, there are parts of the neighborhood that feel haunted; there are broken windows, smashed-in doors and piles of urban rubble. It’s like someone airlifted Salem’s Lot and dropped it near Jones Jr. High, which has been stripped and readied for demolition but stands as a skeletal tombstone. Newbury and Beverly schools also sit empty and half-smashed, portentous testimony to a vanished population.

Behind the Jones corpse, a row of nearly a dozen abandoned houses sits rotting and ransacked, mocking the memories of those who once lived there. Behind one, a large boat sits, half blocking the alley, filled with garbage and God only knows what else. It is surrounded by discarded evidence of children: a collapsed wading pool, a broken car booster seat, a wasted plastic picnic table. It is difficult to imagine that youthful laughter once emanated from the junk-filled backyard that now serves as a boat dock, but all those squandered kids’ items testify that someone once called the building a home.

An abandoned boat in an alley off Broadway Street.

It is clear that Toledo Public Schools and the City of Toledo have abdicated their responsibilities to this area of South Toledo, like deadbeat fathers who seduce, rut and molest to their satisfaction and then disappear like wisps of smoke. If there was a shred of interest in the future of these streets, why would three crumbling schools, scores of atrophied houses and piles of junk like a foundered boat be strewn through the neighborhood?

To drive around the zone of Broadway Street, South Avenue, Western Avenue and such side streets as Field Avenue and Walbridge Avenue is to tour a landscape of urban waste and desolation.

I did not have the heart to cross the Anthony Wayne Trail to witness the destruction of Libbey High School.

And yet …

And yet, in the midst of collapse and ruin, there are people who believe in a better way, people who believe in the future, people who believe in salvation. And that cannot be factored into Forbes’ injudicious list.

Pastor David Kaiser and his wife, Kelly, operate Western Avenue Ministries and the South Toledo Community Center, literally in the shadow of Jones Jr. High (across from that abandoned boat, which sticks in my memory like a horrific talisman in a zombie movie).

The Kaisers belong to that group of people who seem blissfully unaware of the path of least resistance. They choose the cracked, hammered road choked with weeds and unspeakable obstacles. Why? Because they know that is where they are needed.

The South Toledo Community Center offers free hot meals, take-home groceries, clothing and opportunities for education and betterment, ranging from GED classes to parenting help.

David Kaiser

Kaiser estimates there are 6,600 households in the “South Toledo Kids Zone,” which lies between the High-Level Bridge to the Toledo Zoo and the Anthony Wayne Trail to the river.

The demographics are horrific.

• It is a young area. The median age in the S.T. Kids Zone is 29. One-third of the people who live there are younger than 14.
• It is an impoverished area: 35.3 percent of the residents are below poverty level (the Ohio average is 13.4 percent); 16.6 percent have income below 50 percent of the poverty level (the Ohio average is 6.2 percent); and 60 percent of S.T. Kids Zone households are led by single females living in poverty.
• It is a poorly educated area: 39 percent have no high school diploma (the Toledo average is 20 percent and the Ohio average is 17 percent); www.neighborhoodscout.com rates educational achievement on a scale of 1 to 10. The U. S. average is 5, with 10 being the highest. The S.T. Kids Zone neighborhood is rated at 1.

Plan of action

The Kaisers’ ministry is working on a 20-year-plus plan to transform the S.T. Kids Zone, focusing on essential services (food, clothes, education, health care), a “transformational pipeline” (based on the successful programs the Harlem Children’s Zone and Urban Impact of Pittsburgh, emphasizing parenting classes, preschool, tutoring, college preparation and a potential charter school) and infrastructure changes (creating a community development corporation, fixing or removing shuttered houses, creating jobs in repair and security and developing a commercial corridor to capture the attention of commuting workers).

Jones Jr. High School has been abandoned for more than a year.

The ministry has received a growing number of accolades, which it has earned through its actions. It bought and demolished a crack house and two abandoned properties to create an urban agriculture zone, in cooperation with Toledo GROWs. The ministry’s leaders and volunteers have donated more than $150,000 in the past four years.

The ministry spends $2,500 a month to maintain essential services, untold tens of thousands on education opportunities and is working on purchasing its $250,000 building, which drains $1,500 in monthly rent.

There are partnerships with too many organizations to list here, but ProMedica and Cherry Street Ministries are driving forces.

Pastor David and Kelly are hopeful and optimistic, fueled by their faith, but they are realistic. They fully understand the challenge the S.T. Kids Zone faces, with its 14-year-old mothers, violence, drugs, abusive attitudes toward women and survival needs trumping niceties such as education and vocational training.

And yet they believe, and they love, and they try.

The S.T. Kids Zone is engaged in a losing round of whack-a-mole, with problems and neighborhood issues popping up with alarming frequency. It’s a miserable situation with no easy remedy and no short-term comfort.

But as miserable as the blight might be, as miserable as the decay might be, there are people like the Kaisers who are willing to put their shoulders against the encroaching boulder of misery, to slow it, to at least try to slow it. Whether they — and the S.T. Kids Zone — get crushed beneath that boulder depends on how many people are going to join them in the effort to push back, to fight, to make a difference.

Western Avenue Ministries is embarking on a “One of 100” campaign to raise funds for its work. $25 a month from 100 people will cover the costs of the community center’s essential food and clothing services.

A subscription to Forbes costs about $25. The ministry works in the South End to ease misery and solve problems for us. Forbes works in Manhattan to celebrate misery and create problems for us.

Which entity will you reward?

David Kaiser: (419) 344-5844.

Forbes magazine: 1-800-295-0893.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Email him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Anthony Wayne Trail, Cherry Street Ministries, City of Toledo, David Kaiser, Forbes magazine, Harlem Children's Zone, High Level Bridge, Jones Jr. High, Kelly Kaiser, Libbey High School, Lighting The Fuse, Michael S. Miller, Mike Bell, ProMedica, South Toledo Community Center, South Toledo Kids Zone, Toledo GROWS, Toledo Zoo, Western Avenue Ministries, World War II

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 12:01 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
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