How DASH was Created

When Ricky Wolfe moved back to his native LaGrange, Georgia after living elsewhere for three decades, what he recognized upon his return startled him at first -- poverty housing in the idyllic hometown of his youth. This revelation grew into a resolve to eliminate what he deemed responsible for stealing the "sense of community" from local communities, "ordinary neighborliness" from once-extraordinary neighborhoods.

The culprit he held responsible, and sought to overcome:
Substandard Housing.

Wolfe and his wife, Lynn, grew up in LaGrange; he, in a mill village where children were called "lint-heads" by kids raised in more affluent neighborhoods, such as the Beechwood Circle area where his wife grew up. The couple moved from LaGrange in the early 1970s and, over the next 30 years, raised a family while Wolfe worked as an engineer in textiles and electronics. In the 1990s, Wolfe and two partners bought Clark Schwebel Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of printed circuit boards; the company employed 4,000 with operations in the U.S., Europe and Asia. In 1998, the partners sold their company, and the Wolfes moved back to LaGrange the following year.

With a new millennium on the horizon, and early retirement at the age of 48, Wolfe returned to LaGrange, he says, with "basically nothing to do." He committed to volunteering and, in early 2000, was asked to serve on the board of the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate, a move that opened his eyes to poverty housing. Riding through the mill villages of his youth, Wolfe saw dilapidated houses where freshly painted homes once glowed, sagging front porches where families once gathered at twilight, dismal signs of decay and disdain where happiness and sense of home were once prevalent.

The self-described lint-head had grown up in the Dunson Mill Village where both of his parents worked at the mill. Money was tight but times were sweet.

"My memories of the mill villages were filled with images of pretty streets, big trees, security for the children, neighbors being good neighbors, healthy churches, community centers and beautiful yards," Wolfe recalls. "When I came back and drove through these same villages, I was deeply saddened by what I saw - local churches struggling, no community center, homeownership rates that had dropped dramatically and no love evident for neighbor or community."

Problems in the old neighborhoods were only getting worse, primarily due to an aging population that could not afford to invest capital back into their communities.

"There were elderly people, most on fixed incomes, living in big, non-insulated homes that they could no longer maintain," Wolfe recalls. "No capital was going back into the neighborhoods. I saw a trend that, if left unchecked, twenty years from now all these mill villages would be laid to waste and be a blight on this city with the elderly impacted in a very negative way in terms of property value and, more importantly, in terms of their quality of life and health."

Taking action

Moved by what he saw, Wolfe called on friends and family members to assist him in assessing the substandard housing situation in LaGrange. Their findings revealed that as a city of 26,000 in population, LaGrange had approximately 11,000 units of housing; of those, roughly 3,000 were deemed substandard.

The information propelled Wolfe to take further action. The City of LaGrange, the Callaway Foundation, Inc. and LaGrange College had recently studied the projected growth of LaGrange and how local communities could take advantage of, but also control, that inevitable growth. "Their report raised the lack of affordable housing to the forefront as an obstacle here that had to be overcome," says Wolfe.

While several local housing support agencies were making efforts, Wolfe found that none were collaborating with each other. His goal was to bring the best of these efforts together, to work in a unified way to reach the common goal of improving neighborhoods by upgrading the houses in them.

For the bulk of 2002, Wolfe and a loosely organized group of friends served as a task force to gather data, research methods to address housing needs and establish a base of community support. In September 2002, they presented a business plan to the Callaway Foundation, which honored their request for $5 million to begin neighborhood revitalization efforts in the Hillside community. In late 2002, Wolfe and several members of the original task force met for the first time as DASH - Dependable, Affordable, Sustainable Housing - for LaGrange " to chart the course for the Hillside project." The vision was now becoming reality.