Podcast
Renovating Your Neighborhood And Fixing The Housing Issues With Cherie White
While some people spend their weekends renovating their apartments, Cherie White is renovating her neighborhood. Cherie’s neighborhood is full of misfits and the homeless. They are the drug addicts and the prostitutes. The media and landlords have forgotten about them. This is why Cherie is on a mission to fix that. Find out how she started a real estate business with zero money and experience to help out her friends in the neighborhood. Learn how she lost that company, only to create a new one. Find out how close she is to make her dream a reality. She is going to help her friends and give them a place that they can call home. Join your host Janet Hogan as she talks to Cherie about how she is renovating her neighborhood.
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Renovating Your Neighborhood And Fixing The Housing Issues With Cherie White
My next guest is on a mission to find someone with a heart as big as their pockets. While some people spend their weekends renovating their apartment, her dream is to renovate a whole neighborhood, one of the most impoverished in Canada. She wants to see it transform into a place where you have people pushing prams not drugs, where you’d hear the screams of children in a water park instead of screams of ambulances from people with overdoses.
What she’s proposing is a whole new take on the concept of affordable housing where the homeless have a place they can call home and be proud of it. It’s a long way off from that now. To add to her challenge, she has four kids of her own to raise, not to mention $1 billion to make her dream a reality. Cherie White, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.
I know some people probably think you’re crazy. If that’s the case, then the world needs more crazies like you in it. Please state what a nice middle-class woman like you is doing in what many people would describe as the last place in the world they’d want to live. What brought you here to this moment in time?
My background is with the Salvation Army. I’m very privileged to have a grandfather that was raised in the Salvation Army. From when I was a very little girl, I had this wonderful grandfather that would sing gospel songs over me when he would put me to bed at night and would believe in me from such a young age, and it’s the same with my father. There’s a social justice aspect that I believe is something that was passed on to me from generation to generation. Growing up around my dad, I know that he had First Nations pictures all over his house. First Nations art was important.
People and groups that were oppressed were often seen in my family as equal. There was a Salvation Army radical movement called 614 in the Downtown Eastside. My husband and I were privileged enough to come and live out our faith. We got to build relationships with those that are considered financially poor, but also poor in many other ways. This challenge to become a part of a community that was all about social justice and wanting to help others seemed incredibly attractive to me and my husband.
We thought that we could live out our faith and not just go to a Sunday morning service, go home to a suburb and be nice. That seemed a little bit boring to me. What seemed exciting was joining this community that wanted to get their hands dirty and wanted to learn to love their neighbor. My husband and I moved down there. I was pregnant with my third child at that time. I started to get to know people, visit them in their difficult homes, and share my home with them. It was all about building community and loving your neighbor.
You do take that line, “love thy neighbor.” It was even the name of a TV series once. It almost becomes so much part of our language. We don’t even think about it, and probably loving our neighbors is the very last thing we’re doing. We’re living in such isolated units. Tell us about your neighbors. Give us some examples of some of the people who live in your neighborhood so we can get a picture of it.
A lot of the women on the corners are prostituting for drugs a lot. I would use language like they’re being raped daily. They are oppressed. I built a lot of relationships with women that are stuck in this place. The women that I’ve spoken to don’t want to be there. There is a narrative of women that are choosing this, but in my neighborhood, that’s not the case. They will all say, “I don’t want to be there.”
When I ask them, “What’s your dream? What do you want to do? What did you want to do? What were you going to do before this?” They said, “I don’t know how to dream anymore. I’ve forgotten. I don’t have any dreams.” This is not what they would say, but they need to get their next hit in order not to feel the pain of being raped repetitively throughout their day. That’s the women’s perspective. A lot of men are drug dealers.
I also want to be very clear. There is no judgment for women that are in this place. They’re my friends. I do care very much about them and their future. Sometimes, I think that I might have enough dreams that I might be able to start to dream with them. I get that they believe that their mindset is they have to be in this place. This is what they were told from a very young age. This is all that they’re worth. They’re worthless. Their only purpose here is to serve men.
That’s my neighbor. I live beside a brothel on the Downtown Eastside. I reached out to these women and made friendships with them. A lot of men are drug dealers. There are also families that live down there. There are also children that live there. The media likes to portray my neighborhood as this place that you don’t go anywhere near. I want to say that as a Salvation growing up, we go to the fire. We don’t run away from the fire.
We wanted to make a massive impact and make a difference in this neighborhood. I believe that we have. The media likes to portray the neighborhood as a place that you don’t go to at all. The poor families that live there get no voice. They’re completely disregarded by the media because they don’t have a dramatic story. They’re not the shooting on the corner, although we don’t have a lot of shootings because there are guns in the neighborhood. There are lots of stabbings. Once in a while, shooting.
There are definitely lots of mental illness, people that are struggling and have been forgotten that are roaming the streets and don’t know where to go. Nobody cares about them. Those are the people that are in my neighborhood. They are the people that want lots of non-profits that want to make an impact, families and women that are oppressed, and men that are selling drugs.
Do you differentiate between the men and women in terms of this one group is better off than another? Do you see that they are all stuck in that same trap essentially?
They’re both stuck in poverty. They’re stuck in a poverty mindset and financially in poverty.
I want to talk to you a bit more about your vision. I’m imagining a place where the physical amenities are much better, and people have a proper roof over their heads. That’s one aspect of it. As you said, it’s a mindset. That’s an issue as well. How do you influence that? What’s your idea as to how you get people out of this way of thinking that is being deeply programmed into them?
Community is the answer to that just like you and me. My friends influence my mindset. When I sit down with a good close friend and I say, “This is the issue I’m going through.” They’re not trained psychologists but they’re friends. They’ll say, “This is what I think about this.” That might shift my mindset on a particular issue. I know mindset goes much deeper. The answer to people that are stuck and have lost their ability to dream is by becoming a friend and modeling something different. The power of modeling is so huge, and we know that.
From the very first time, many years ago, when we moved into the Downtown Eastside, we opened our doors for meals. I have four children. I’m a mama bear and I will protect my children like most mothers. I’m not going to open my door to strangers that are having lots of mental issues and are on crack to say, “Come on in.”
A relationship was built before I opened my door and say, “Why don’t you come and join us at our table? Why don’t you share a meal with us?” When I get to a place that I feel comfortable with a friend, I say, “Why don’t you come into our house?” This is where family is modeled. This is where mindsets start to change. It’s when they can see a mother care for her children. They see a father that sits at a table and laughs with their kids at the end of the day. They’re like, “This is not how I was raised. What is happening here?”
That is where we’ve seen the biggest change in people. It’s when they get to see something modeled. It’s exactly the same for me. When I’m learning a new skill, I want to see how it works. I want to see it modeled for me so that I can be successful at that new skill. That’s how we build community. That’s how we see people change.
I have to paint something that I haven’t painted yet from this conversation. A lot of people in my neighborhood live in something called SRO, which stands for Single Room Occupancy. This means that there’s one floor and you get a tiny room. It’s like New York in that sense. There are not a lot of space. You get one bathroom for about ten people to share on that one floor. It’s like college residents or something. All your worldly possessions have to be shoved into these SROs.
One of my friends started to come and visit regularly. Her name was Roseanne. God bless her because she became a good friend of mine and came into my life. She had more impact on my life than I had on hers. One day she said to me, “I invited someone over to my space because you invited me over to your space.” I was so pleased about that because she was getting the power of modeling. She only had a 200-square foot room. That’s what she had and she wanted to share it with someone else. I was like, “Something is happening here. She’s getting community.” Eventually, I met her friend. The answer is the impact is in the modeling.
That’s very powerful because so much work in the benefactor space is administered from above. They’re sprinkling gifts and funds on the matter with no integration or real responsibility taking. It’s very interesting what you say about the method that you have in modeling. It feels right when you describe it like that. That’s so encouraging to know.
I remember when you mentioned the word Salvation Army. The fellow who married us many years ago worked for the Sally, as we call the Salvation Army. I loved him so much because he was a minister of religion, but not your classic type. He was absolutely pragmatic. He played the trumpet beautifully too at our wedding. His whole thing was all about giving older people an experience of life. He drove a bus for people who are 80-plus. We had wonderful places so they could have a quality of life. He taught me a lot about this pragmatic aspect of not preaching from the pulpit but going out there with your sleeves rolled up.
That’s interesting to hear that you had that grounding in your grandfather and your father. I can see that that’s given you a firm foundation, but I’m human and you’re human. It doesn’t mean that we’re bulletproof and we’re impermeable to things like self-doubt, questioning our path, and all of that. Could you share with us what have been the toughest times for you in that area where you felt at your most vulnerable in the work that you’ve chosen?
It doesn’t have anything to do with the downtown side. It’s more on the business side of things. A few years ago, I decided that I was going to move from a full-time position in the Salvation Army into real estate because housing was the piece that my friends couldn’t get. They could rebuild relationships and find a job, but they couldn’t get housing. I decided I was going to be the landlord that would provide the housing for my friends. The first shall be last.
In Vancouver, there’s a housing shortage. As soon as you say that you’re in recovery from addictions, the landlord will put you at the last of the list. There’s no way. I decided, “You’re going to be the first on my list and I’m going to purchase somehow,” because I had no money. I’m working for the Salvation Army. I was going to figure out a way to provide housing for my friends that were moving from a lifestyle of addictions to a lifestyle of what I call freedom.
I did that. I started an investment business and I learned all about real estate on the residential side. I was doing very well. I figured it out. I figured out systems. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur until that point and until I moved away. I started winning awards in my network. I got it until I didn’t. There was one day that I had made a huge error in my business. I hired someone to oversee my finances. It’s because I was alone and isolated as I was the top dog. I was full of myself with my pride at that point in time that I was so successful.
I hired a guy to look after my finances off of Craigslist. This guy came in and gave me a big spiel about how he was all about helping people and wanted to help the poor. He had all this business experience, so I believed him. I didn’t get any recommendations from anyone. He came in and manipulated me into giving company money to him. He stole all sorts of money from my company. That was the beginning of my downturn. At that point, I was alone and scared. I didn’t have the support of my husband and my family. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, but I knew I was in a lot of trouble.
That was my most vulnerable point where I went to go and found someone to see. They said, “Start exercising and start getting back to your faith.” I did those two things. It was exercising, getting up early in the morning, and taking care of myself. I had those intimate talks with God because here I am. I’m alone. I want to end everything. I’m full of fear. I wouldn’t say suicide was on the plate, but moving to Mexico, leaving my family, running, and trying to start off all over again was definitely on the plate.
It was those 6:00 AM walks that I tried to figure out, “How do I start over again? What does that look like? What am I going to do with all this money that I owe people?” I didn’t know what to do. It’s been a three-year comeback. It’s taken a long time to believe in myself again. That was the thing. It was the identity piece that was being attacked. It was like, “I don’t know who I am anymore.” In that moment of everything falling apart, I didn’t know who I was. I thought I was a good person but now I’ve got everybody calling me and yelling at me.
I was so lost. Thank God some people in my life reminded me, “You’re not a bad person. You made a mistake and a lot of people make mistakes in business. It may take you 3, 5 or 10 years to recover, but with the right strategies and the right team around you, you can do this.” I started to believe that for myself. Now I’m in a place where I have a wonderful board. I have a new company. I’m building a community in large multifamily developments.
I’ve moved from that business of investing in residential into commercial, and putting together strategies of rent-to-own so people can invest long-term in the neighborhood. I’m so excited about what Steadfast Developments potential has. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I didn’t take that six months off, figured out and be reminded of who I am.
I’m back and I’m strong. I have a wonderful board. I have five fabulous development developers on my board with all sorts of experience. I’ve put together a fantastic development team that has multiple years of building and development experience. My development team, my board, and the investors that believe in me are all moving towards this one goal together. I’m good now.
I totally relate to that crash and how identity gets caught up in the wrong hook. It’s interesting because when we think of addiction, we think of physical substances, alcohol, drugs, food and work sometimes. We don’t talk about the addiction to a false identity so much, the one that’s more ego-based. When that mask gets ripped off, that hurts. It leaves us momentarily blinded.
That’s the other thing. You talk about, “Who am I?” We’re walking around and we can’t see. We’re feeling our way through a room that feels so unfamiliar to us. Where do we go from there? Would that describe the fundamental shift for you? Do you think that you’ve gone from an egoic self to now you’ve got out of your own way, and you can see clearly that you’re here for something other than your own personal gratification? Would that be right?
I am so clear as to who I am now. I don’t feel lost. I’m definitely affirmed in my identity and feel hugely supported.
With the vision that you have, is this a vision that you feel is gaining traction? How are you going in that pursuit of getting funding? What’s that journey like? This is a topic that comes up a lot in conversations I have, particularly with women. It’s very hard to get funding. I hate using the old cliché of a White-male dominated world. I’m not a fan of propagating clichés, but it seems to be true in the funding arena. Share with us how you’ve found that aspect of the journey.
That’s definitely been the hardest piece. I don’t think that the money piece has anything to do with being male or female. Commercial development is very much male-dominated, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the financial piece. Our biggest supporters are people that I call social impact investors. They want to see big hearts and big pockets.
They want to see their money not sit in the bank. They’re often not people that have $7 million and say, “$7 million is not enough for me. I need another $20 million in order to be happy.” Once they get $20 million, they usually say, “I need another $50 million.” That’s their whole mindset. These are investors that want to see their money being put into a place that is changing lives, supporting and preventing homelessness. I want to stress that Steadfast Developments is not necessarily picking up the people that have already fallen into poverty. We’re looking at the rung right up top, the women and children that are about to fall into poverty.
I have a friend. She’s one of my best friends. She had her children and she was living in her car. She had nowhere to go. She was hopping from couch to couch and hoping that the next month, she would be able to find a place in Vancouver. These are the families that we are targeting. We want to be the net to hold these families from falling into poverty. Prevention is a huge thing.
I imagine it’s such a spiral. Once they fall into that, it’s very hard to climb back out.
If we’re going to stop poverty in our neighborhood, we need to look at the rung above it and we can stop there. Over 5, 10 or 15 years, we can have women and families in our neighborhood invested long-term with the rent-to-own program. We’re going to see their children grow up and they’re going to have a safe place. They can also be a holistic part of our company, which provides social enterprise jobs as well as intentional community building.
Hopefully, you will raise the funds.
I find this very interesting. When I was doing residential sandbox, I needed a couple of hundred thousand in order to do a deal. Those people that had a couple of hundred thousand in their RSPs or something like that would come along and joint venture with me. Finding the capital for that sandbox was easy. I did not have any multimillion-dollar social impact investors in that sandbox or in my life at that time. I didn’t know a millionaire.
Interestingly enough, now that I’m in a different sandbox leveraging my experience, I’m attracting multi-millionaires that have a passion to see their money being used for good and social impact. It’s mind-blowing to me. Because of my persistence, diligence and tenacity, I have a list of multi-millionaires that are social impact investors and aren’t looking for 10%, 15% or 20% on their funds. They are happy with the 3% to 7% return. They’re not donators. They’re not going to give their money away to a non-profit. They want to see a return. They want to hold onto their capital so they can repeat it again in another project. They’re coming in slow and sure.
There was one deal that I have been working on, and God bless this investor. She is one of my favorite people. She said yes to me on this outside of the box investment. It’s pioneering. It is not your normal LLP. It’s not just in and out. It is a new way of investing. I love her because she has been journeying along with me. We still have not closed the deal. We are very close to closing this deal. When we close this deal, I will be within a hand reach of my goal of $1 billion in order to radically revitalize the neighborhoods.
That’s so inspiring. I hear this story a lot. When you’re very clear in your vision, and it’s clearly not about you. It’s not about having a Cherie statue erected in the middle of Newtown Square. It’s not coming from fear but the passion of wanting to see real change for some higher good. I feel that is genuine. The reason I know it’s genuine is because I can see your perseverance. When we’re coming from that fear space of, “I don’t want to die feeling that I haven’t made my contribution and I haven’t been a person of significance,” that’s totally different when we’re coming from that fear-based space.
Eventually, we run out of energy and steam. We don’t have anything driving us anymore. What you’re talking about here is perseverance beyond what normal people would expect people to do. It’s in a whole new realm. It’s almost like the universe is testing us. It’s going to be like one of those steeplechases where you have a series of hurdles that you have to jump over. If you can cross the finishing line, then we’ll throw some interesting investors your way. Does it feel that way to you?
Very much so. If we have time, I’d love to share about James Rouse. I want to tell you that this isn’t a pie in the sky vision. I did some research on other revitalization leaders that were successful. James Rouse is one of those people. He was a developer back in the ‘60s. He decided that in his development, 50% would go to Black people and 50% would go to White people. That was a huge thing back in 1960.
He decided that once he had sold that last piece of land to a White person, the next person had to be Black, even though he would have made significantly more money if he had sold his whole development to White people at that time. If you go into YouTube and look at James Rouse and his autobiography, there’s a 30-second clip of this Black woman. If you blink, you’ll miss it. It was the best part of the whole hour that I watched. What she said was, “Because of the fact that James Rouse gave our family the opportunity to purchase land in his development, we got out of poverty and we have never gone back.”
I thought to myself, “What kind of developer do I want to be? Do I want to be a developer with multi-million dollars in my bank? Do I want to be known as the developer that was able to help a family out of poverty?” If I can help one family out of poverty by providing an opportunity to own their place, that is the type of developer I want to go to my grave as. I don’t have all the details around how I’m going to do that quite yet.
That is so inspiring. I’ve been a developer in the past. We get tarnished with a brush. I’ve felt at some points, we were seen as one rung up from these used car salesmen. To put a whole reframe on the concept of development, it’s not about filling our pockets but making a better world because you can. You’ve got that vision. Thank you for sharing that story. I love the idea of the ripple effect, that one action can have a number of multiplying actions like an exponential effect that you probably have no idea of or no notion of that.
I’d like to get you to answer this question if you would. To anyone who wants to make a big impact on the world, but they’re not as far progressed. Maybe they didn’t have that Salvation Army foundation that you had and might be struggling with self-doubt, but they definitely have a sense of how they would like to play their part in making the world a better place. What would you say to someone in that position in their lives?
Don’t give up. That’s number one. There are many stories. Listen to all the stories of all the people that didn’t give up and got their dreams. There’s a whole book of story after story of people that didn’t give up. They were successful and got their dreams. It could be one guy that was walking across a country in Africa in order to find a better life for himself. It could be Mother Teresa who had to ask thirteen times before the Pope gave her permission to stop teaching wealthy Catholic parents’ children and move to Calcutta.
I immerse myself in stories. What we put into ourselves is what would come up. We have to be careful with what we listen to and what we put in. I would read books that were all about people that were successful because they didn’t give up. I watched videos on anyone and what their story was, “I didn’t give up and because of that, I’m successful today.” I was in a restaurant with an investor and on the wall were all these famous people.
I thought to myself, “They were famous because they didn’t give up.” Number one, don’t give up and surround yourself with stories of people that don’t give up. Don’t hang out with people who are balloon poppers. Be careful of who you share your vision and your dream with because there are people who love to pop your balloons even before they get to rise very high in the sky. Be careful of who you hang out with and hang out with people that believe in you and your vision. Those are the three things that I would do and have done that have made a world of difference and why I still do.
Also, take care of yourself physically and mentally. Do prayer and meditation at the beginning of the day, and physically working out. You need your health. Take care of yourself so that during the day, when those challenges come up, you are mentally and physically well enough to deal with them. Have a phenomenal team of people around you so that when those challenges come, you can reach out to them. They have the experience and the expertise in order to guide you the right way so that you’re not like me who found myself alone and confused, but instead have learned from that. Learn from my mistakes. Surround yourself with a massively wonderful team. I can be one of those people. You can call me any time.
Thank you, Cherie. That’s so inspirational. Not only are you going to create the neighborhood, that’s inevitable, but also you’re going to inspire many people to rise to the challenge because of the scale of what you’re doing. That’s a balloon that’s very easy to pop. The fact that you’re hanging in there is going to inspire a lot of other people to have courage, step forward, and rise to their particular challenge as well. Thank you very much for appearing on the show and being such a leading light.
Thank you so much, Janet. I appreciate your words. Thank you.
Important Links:
YouTube – Who Is Jim Rouse?
About Cherie White
Cherie White is an award winning passionate visionary when it comes to social justice and business. She has been nominated for the social justice RBC women’s impact award 3 years in a row, and won REIN’s (Real Estate Investor Network) renovator of the year award for 2017. As a resident of Canada’s poorest postal code, Vancouver’s downtown east side, Steadfast Developments was created out of a dissatisfaction of accessibility of affordable housing for people in the recovery community. She chooses to live in a community home that reaches out to its neighbors and offer shelter, sharing of meals and mentor ship programs for women entrepreneurs. Her unique business model comes from her background in social justice through the Salvation Army. She believes that in order to have success in our lives we need a family, a home and a job.
Cherie has been working in real estate for 4 years. She started fixing and flipping residential homes from 2016-2019. In late 2019 she moved into multi family commercial developments with the idea of building healthy and positive communities while building with an environmentally friendly building product; mass timber. Her goal is to build all developments as passive homes and leave a positive impact on the environment.
Cherie has been married to her husband Aaron for 21 years and has raised their four children in the downtown east side of Vancouver with the hope that they will know and see first hand what it means to “love thy neighbor.”
