43
Liberty apartments revitalize neighborhood
Photo
Frederick Torres, left, project manager and partner in the North Twelve Property Management Group, speaks about the renovated Liberty Pride Apartments with Patrick Ungaro, Liberty Township administrator, and Trustee Jodi Stoyak. The apartments are at Colonial and Green Acres drives.
Liberty
Among the overgrown grass, boarded-up windows and doorways and dilapidated houses that make up the area of Colonial and Green Acres drives in south Liberty, a renovated apartment building has emerged.
Liberty Pride, a recently renovated apartment developed by North Twelve Property Management Group, is only a short walk away from the ValleyCare Northside Medical Center on Gypsy Lane and only three blocks from the township’s re-emerging commercial area along Belmont Avenue. But Project Manager Frederick Torres sees it as a symbolic investment of urban renewal just as much as it is a capital investment.
“We wanted to put this corner back on the map as a positive place,” Torres said. “Instead of it being an embarrassment, we want people to have pride in this place.”
And he started his goal with the apartment building that acted as the epicenter of the area’s decline — 3001 Green Acres.
“It was all generated out of here,” he said of the drug deals and violence that took place inside. “They basically saw it as a fortress. They thought once they were in here, anything goes.”
Once the building closed down about two years ago, the crime in the area dissipated.
“This was a great area probably about 15 years ago,” said Pat Ungaro, township administrator. “And it sort of stabilized because everything is pretty much empty.”
Although it is only one apartment complex, Ungaro sees it as an important jump-start.
“Everything starts with a step,” he said. “And it took an outsider to appreciate the potential.”
Torres was born in Puerto Rico but raised in the projects of the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill, a one-time rough neighborhood on the west side. Today, it is filled with condominiums and town houses.
“If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere, easily,” Torres said.
After working for a time as a private investigator, his partner, Nancy Druker — who began North Twelve in 2004 — and he developed houses in Massachusetts and in western Pennsylvania. But Liberty Pride, with its 24,835-square-foot units that Torres is renting out at $525 a month, is his biggest project. So before investing, he ensured he was making the right decision by checking out the Colonial Drive area, and in January, even went as far as staying overnight in the apartment’s parking lot, sleeping in his rental car.
“I slept there all night to see what I was going to put my tenants into,” Torres said.
He heard several bad things from locals about the area, but since that night in his car, he has found them all to be an exaggeration.
He took a leap both fiscally and emotionally. Like much of the business re- emergence in south Liberty, Torres had no help from banks, no grants from federal programs and little help from investors. He poured much of his own money into the project. And then packed up and moved from Massachusetts to only five minutes away from the apartment with his wife, Michelle, and 3-year-old son.
“The commitment from him and his family shows the dedication,” Trustee Jodi Stoyak said.
“We decided to do something completely different,” he said. “We could manage this out from Massachusetts, but we decided to move out here.”
While planning the renovation, Torres knew he didn’t want to have the same old four-white-walls approach to its interior design. The halls and stairwells instead are painted a vibrant yellow – or a “Nancy yellow,” named after the shade created by his business partner, while keeping the trim white. The color, he said, gives tenants a much more friendly greeting when returning home, more so than one solid color.
Everything in the apartments from the shower stalls to the door knobs to the intercom system is new. And each unit has laminated floors because carpets, he said, trap dirt and are unhealthy where you have people moving in and out.
“We want this building to be the new standard,” he said.
As far as security goes, Torres installed a security camera system that feeds directly to the township’s 911 center.
“I want my tenants to feel safe,” he said.
Liberty Pride officially opened Aug. 13, and Torres has four tenants.
And for a man who saw the troubled neighborhood in which he was raised turn vibrant, he already sees the potential of the Colonial and Green Acres area.
Liberty Pride, he hopes, “is just one small pebble in a huge lake.”