COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: L.A. guy brings green to Buffalo
My top contender for Buffalo’s unofficial Citizen of the Year lives in Los Angeles.
I see that as a sign of progress.
After all of the abuse we have taken from out-of-town predators, there finally is someone who came not to feed on Buffalo, but to nurture it.
For all I care, he could hate chicken wings and think “wide right” involves oversteering. As long as he does right by us, he could live in a cave.
Mike Hananel heads Horizon Realty, an L. A.-based partnership that, three years ago, bought 19 properties in the city, mostly multi-unit apartment buildings. Slimeball tenants were cleared out. Buildings were fixed up. Now Hananel is spending $2 million to transform 15 of the grand, but environmentally nightmarish, 19th century structures into models of efficiency. The official announcement is Tuesday.
The man from 2,500 miles away is blazing a “green” trail for local builders, developers and investors. Maybe Terrell Owens can lend him his key to the city.
I met Hananel last week. He is 41, tall with crinkly black hair, a deejay’s chocolatey tone and the can-do appeal of Thomas the Tank Engine. Instead of the buy-and- destroy absentee landlords whom we know and loathe, this guy is buy-and-fix.
“I kept a low profile, because I knew there was a stigma against out-of-town investors,” said Hananel, sitting in his Elmwood Avenue office. “I knew we would have to prove ourselves.”
Marilyn Rodgers is a community activist in Johnson Park, in the shadow of City Hall. She thought the worst when she heard in 2006 that an L. A. investor bought a nearby drug-infested apartment building. “The proof is in the pudding, and [Hananel] not only made the pudding, he put whipped cream and a cherry on it,” Rodgers said. “He cleaned up the building, his people screen tenants, and now he’s ‘greening’ his properties. He’s for real.”
I knew that one of these days, somebody from Parts Distant with big promises would not leave us bleeding in the gutter, our hearts broken and our wallets empty.
Our memories are fresh with the image of British import Bashar Issa, who charmed locals—myself included—but left a bombed-out Statler Towers in his wake. Before Issa, came nightmare slumlord “flippers” like Houston-based Scott Wizig. They preyed on naive homeowner wannabes, leaving busted dreams and abandoned houses in their wakes.
Hananel will spend $2 million to trade heat-leaking wooden sash windows for fiberglass, to replace doors, to put in energy-saving furnaces and to foam-insulate roofs.
Hananel is neither a saint nor a hero. He foresaw the L. A. real estate tsunami and saw Buffalo—particularly its rising tide of downtown housing—as a safe harbor. He is here to make money, and more power to him. But he is doing it in a way that will not leave us taping his picture to our dart boards.
Buffalo is his latest step on a “green” journey that began as a UCLA student, when Hananel stenciled images of dolphins on L. A. storm drains. It reminded folks that what they dumped eventually turned up on the beach.
This goes beyond a feel-good, save-the- planet sensibility. Going green puts green in his wallet. With Obama-era environmental grants and loans, Hananel will save more money by upgrading his buildings than he will spend to do it.
“I’ll cut $15,000 a month in energy costs,” he said, “while paying $9,000 a month on the loans. . . . This works for me, it works for the tenants, it helps to preserve the buildings.” Sometimes it takes an outsider to show us the way. Nobody ever said the Citizen of the Year has to actually live here.
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