River views beckon, when office workers return

Wayne Risher
Daily Memphian

An elevator ride from the lobby to third floor of ALCO Management’s newly redesigned headquarters in One Union Place is like going forward in time 35 years.

The first floor lobby is surrounded by office partitions that could double as the set of a vintage detective thriller. It’s dark and devoid of visual connection to the building’s historic and natural surroundings.

But on the third floor awaits an airy, spacious office setting filled with natural light and open to views of the riverfront and Downtown Memphis’s historic Cotton Row neighborhood.

ALCO managers believe their office expansion has democratized the workplace by taking away executives’ corner offices and giving expansive views to pretty much everyone else.

Unfortunately, only a smattering of ALCO’s 45 Memphis office employees are able to enjoy those views these days because most are virtually commuting in the age of COVID-19.

ALCO’s renovation of the four-story building’s second and third floors was winding up in March when the company, a regional provider of subsidized housing, sent its employees home to be safe from COVID.

Although the offices weren’t designed with social distancing in mind, the revamp allocated more space to employee workstations and less to executives’ private offices, with the balance going to collaborative and gathering spaces and amenities.

Succession

Anchoring a break area near the elevator on the third floor is a vintage green vinyl sofa, a throwback to the founding of the company in 1974 by Frank Z. Jemison. ALCO bought the building on Howard’s Row at Union and Wagner Place in 1984.

Jemison relinquished the title of chief executive officer this summer to Berkeley Burbank, while retaining the role of chairman of his privately held residential property development and management company.

Ownership still has its perks, apparently, because Jemison has the only large corner office left on the third floor. It’s tucked away on the back side, away from a wall of windows overlooking the Wolf River Harbor, Mud Island River Park and the Mississippi River.

The new CEO’s office, by comparison, is small and nondescript and virtually indistinguishable from other C-suite offices lining an interior hallway on the third floor.

Elbow room

ALCO’s nerve center is a workstation where administrative services manager Denise Glasco and her employees have been holding down the fort since ALCO brought back a small number of essential workers.

With newly enlarged workstations, Glasco and her co-workers easily have more than 6 feet between them. She oversees a staff of five people who take turns coming into the office two at a time.

ALCO specializes in developing, owning and managing rent-subsidized apartments for low-income residents, including 13 properties with more than 2,300 apartments in Memphis. It also manages a few market-rate apartment communities.

Glasco’s team provides administrative support to the home office and ALCO property management teams overseeing more than 5,800 apartment units at 63 sites spread across nine states.

“It’s been very different,” said Glasco, who has been back in the office full time since June. “I didn’t know what to expect and I thought what we had before was OK, but now that’s it’s done, I love it.”

“More people have access to the view now,” she said.

Just add people

Burbank and the founder’s daughter, Sarah Jemison, said company officials scrutinized the redesign in light of COVID-19 and concluded it could accommodate the workforce safely when everyone returns to the office.

The office footprint was expanded to support up to 60 employees, in hopes of preparing for growth over the next 20 years in a 45-person headquarters staff.

“We did a survey when we started the process of renovating our office, asking the team, ‘What do you want, what do you not want?’ and there was very strong desire not to have a totally open workspace, and so we followed that, which was very convenient,” Sarah Jemison said.

Burbank said, “Our workstations got a little bit larger. We were trying to say ‘What’s that middle of the road?’ Not everybody can have a private office, but not everybody wants to be crammed in six people to a table.”

“The natural space where people sit at in their work stations is more than 6 feet apart and just the nature of it was we were thinking ahead to a 20-year horizon, so we have extra desks, extra offices,” Burbank said.

A Bowflex and other exercise equipment for a workout room are still in the building basement, because there’s no way to put enough distance between two people working out at the same time. A touch-screen fob was added to the hallway door.

“We have pretty large common spaces and a lot of collaboration areas where two people can go and have a lot of space,” Burbank said. “We added a balcony on the front, so that’s a pretty exciting amenity.”

The renovation included two art installations by Memphis artists.

A blue stairwell installation called “The Making of a Home” consists of a wall filled with discarded tools. It was a collaboration between Parker Design Studio, the design team leader, and art consultant Anna Wunderlich. An installation of keys on the second floor, called “Making Waves,” was created by Sarah Crawford.

Glasco said she’s enjoying the balcony and her standing desk, a new feature at every workstation.

“I don’t think I’ve sat in my desk chair since I came back. I really like it,” Glasco said.

Waiting for normalcy

If there’s a downside of having seven to 10 people in an office built for 60, it’s lack of opportunities for interaction among co-workers.

ALCO sought a middle ground by keeping the headquarters open on a limited basis and introducing protocols such as extra cleaning and appointment-only access to property managers in the field.

Previous enhancements of technology to better manage a far-flung portfolio served the organization well post-COVID.

It already had implemented Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, for example, and has been rolling out digital services at apartment communities as they’re refurbished.

Residents at about a third of ALCO’s properties can apply for apartments, request maintenance and submit documentation on digital devices. ALCO also is adding propertywide WiFi as it upgrades sites such as Chickasaw Place in Binghampton, where a $10 million renovation is in progress.

ALCO hasn’t set a date when employees will come back to the office, post vaccine.

Burbank said he thinks creativity suffers from the lack of interactions.

“I think as we get further and further away from having been all together, you do have those social connections begin to fray a little bit,” he said.

“I am hopeful and confident and a big advocate of coming back to the office. I think realistically we’ll have some people who’ll want to work from home two days a week,” Burbank said.

Residents’ needs expand

The quandary of when office workers can safely return to work pales in comparison to the pressures put on low-income residents by the pandemic’s ravages of sickness, joblessness, hunger and disruption of schools.

ALCO fell under the eviction moratorium approved by the federal government early in the pandemic, which barred evictions based solely on non-payment of rent.

Under ALCO’s business model, a resident’s share of rent is lowered if the resident’s income declines because of job loss.

“I know we haven’t evicted anybody for non-payment of rent during those times, and we have this natural adjustment if somebody has a loss of income, they can come in and have their rent adjusted,” Burbank said.

Particularly at ALCO’s rent-subsidized apartments in Memphis, residents have struggled to keep jobs, obtain food, clothing and other necessities and make sure school-age children participate in distance learning programs offered by Shelby County Schools.

Before COVID-19, in response to growing need, ALCO had already determined to provide more space for social services facilities operated by Neighborhood Christian Center at Chickasaw Place and Robinhood Park apartments, Jemison said.

Meeting the need

The faith-based Neighborhood Christian Center partners with ALCO at five Memphis communities, operating food pantries, clothes closets, after-school and tutoring programs and social service case management for some residents.

Neighborhood Christian Center’s staff was on the front lines of providing services to ALCO property residents through the summer and fall, including virtual learning sites for students.

It had to pull back with recently tightened restrictions to stem COVID’s spread, switching to contactless approaches such as a drive-up food pantry and clothes closet.

“At the beginning we offered full virtual site support,” Ephie Johnson, president and chief executive of Neighborhood Christian Center, said Nov. 23. “And then as COVID has gotten an uptick in the last week or so, we have a call-in service where our staff still checks on families every day and does check-ins with the parents regarding their students’ activity online.”

While ALCO has provided space and utilities for programs, one of the biggest challenges has been helping families make the transition to online learning.

“We had some families that were technologically challenged,” Johnson said.

“We saw the dire need to do it. It wasn’t necessarily demand. Families were not prepared, so we had to go out and kind of compel them to get devices and to show them what it means to sign on and log on. Our challenges at the beginning were more so training people and emphasizing what needed to be done so their kids could get online,” Johnson said.

Decades of history

Neighborhood Christian Center and ALCO have a history going back more than 30 years, when Johnson’s mother, JoeAnn Ballard, started working with Jemison.

“They’ve been one of the best partners to work with,” Johnson said. “We come to an agreement about what we’re going to do, they trust us to do that, and they give us the autonomy to do what we say we’re going to do.”

The relationship benefits residents and the company.

“Some people that would probably get evicted, some of those situations are highly reduced because we’re there to help try to coach that family along, rather than being part of a churning process where they’re going from place to place,” Johnson said.

“It’s been a blessing to have their support in how we’re working with the parents. If people are living on one of their properties, they’re in a good place,” she said.

What’s next

With a subsidy-oriented business model, ALCO hasn’t been exposed to as much volatility as market-rate housing providers.

“We feel like we’ve been able to make the appropriate adjustments and continue to move forward pretty well,” Burbank said.

“I think in the multifamily industry wide early on there was a significant worry, intense worry about loss of jobs and eviction moratoriums and income and being able to staff properties and all this. I think across our industry and in particular ALCO, we’ve felt very fortunate to be able to come through pretty well,” he said.

“I continue to be cautiously optimistic we’ll be able to come up with something. The program we operate under has remained funded. It’s totally dependent on the federal government,” Burbank said.

Jemison, who previously worked for the National Low Income Housing Coalition before joining the family business, said the pandemic has brought new awareness to the need for adequate housing.

“The housing crisis has been getting worse every year for two decades, and that’s now becoming part of the national conversation. But there’s still so much need here and everywhere,” Jemison said.