March/April 2014 Openers

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the family owners of Raia Properties Corp.—headquartered in Ramsey, N.J., about a half-hour from Manhattan’s Upper West Side—searched for a way to turn their emotions into actions. Samuel A. Raia, 39, a managing director of the firm, lost his friend and college roommate, Patrick Aranyos, who had been in the World Trade Center’s South Tower.

“We both were affected quite a bit” by the 9/11 tragedy, says Samuel’s cousin Lawrence C. Raia, also a managing director at the third-generation real estate investment management and development firm.

“Over the years, we’ve wanted to get involved and support our country’s fight against terror,” says Samuel.

Inspiration came in the form of the 2007 book Lone Survivor, the story of Marcus Luttrell, the only Navy SEAL to survive a 2005 surveillance mission in Afghanistan that turned into a deadly battle with the Taliban.

- Advertisement -

Upon his return to the States, Luttrell’s Texas community built him a home. “That started getting me thinking about what we do on a day-to-day basis, which is provide apartments to people,” Samuel Raia says.

The Raia family enterprise began in 1930, when Joseph Raia Sr. began hauling sand and gravel in a Model T Ford truck. His business grew into Raia Industries, a concrete-producing firm. The family later moved into commercial and industrial real estate in the 1970s and into self-storage facilities in the mid-1990s. In 2004, they divested some of their office and industrial properties, replacing them with residential real estate investments in the South and Southeast. Today Raia Properties has a portfolio of nearly 3,100 garden-style multi-family apartment communities.

Samuel and Lawrence began investigating the housing needs of returning wounded Special Operations warriors and their families. “We learned a little bit more about what the military was providing, which medically is really pretty terrific, but from a housing standpoint is not so great,” says Lawrence.

Usually, when a Special Operations member is recovering stateside from severe injuries, the military puts the family up in a one-bedroom hotel room; the wounded warrior also moves there after discharge from the hospital. The family lives in the small hotel room while the military member undergoes rehabilitation, a process that might take a year and a half, Lawrence explains.

“What we’re trying to do,” Samuel explains, “is bring the family unit back together in an environment that supports the healing process and helps to create a sense of normalcy.”

 

Birth of a foundation

Samuel came up with an idea, fully embraced by Lawrence: Raia Properties would provide free, fully furnished apartments to wounded Special Operations members (including SEALS, Green Berets, Rangers, Joint Special Operations Command, Night Stalkers and Delta Force) and their families. They approached the three second-generation principals of the family enterprise—Samuel’s father, Samuel S. Raia (mayor of Saddle River, N.J.); Lawrence’s father, Lawrence A. Raia; and their uncle Joseph S. Raia—to ask their opinion on their jointly developed plan to create a foundation, which they called Homes Fit for Heroes.

“From the start, they’ve been incredibly supportive,” says Lawrence. “There was no hesitation.”

Otis Baskin, a consultant with the Family Business Consulting Group, notes that the Raias are making a substantial contribution to help the service members. “Any inventory they take to use for wounded warriors is inventory that’s not available [to generate revenue],” notes Baskin, who has worked with the Raia family since 2011. “So in many ways they are not only making a financial commitment, they’re also agreeing that as owners of this property that maximizing its return is not their only value.”

The Internal Revenue Service recognized Homes Fit for Heroes as a 501(c)(3) organization in December 2010. The five Raia family members are among its trustees, along with executives at other organizations that support the foundation.

“What we said was, ‘We’ll donate an apartment for you. It’s fully furnished, it’s free, but it’s in a civilian community,’ ” Lawrence explains. “They’re in very good school districts, so kids can go back to school, they make friends, and when they’re not at the hospital they’re not surrounded by the hospital. They’re surrounded by life that’s normal.” By contrast, he notes, families of wounded service members who are recovering in accommodations provided by the military are constantly surrounded by reminders of trauma and injury. “Twenty-four/seven they are around … very devastated families, and they’re trying to get some semblance of normalcy,” Lawrence says.

The program also provides housing for some military members receiving treatment that is not approved by military health insurance. In these cases, the military does not provide a housing allowance, so the wounded warrior must maintain his or her primary housing while also covering lodging expenses in the place where he or she receives treatment.

 

Joining forces

Homes Fit for Heroes’ supporting organizations include Raia Properties’ management company, Memphis-based Fogelman Management Group, as well as other real estate firms nationwide, so the foundation can meet the needs of service members recovering in areas where Raia doesn’t own property.

To screen candidates for its housing services, Homes Fit for Heroes has formed a strategic relationship with U.S. Special Operations Command Care Coalition, which supports wounded, ill and injured Special Operations warriors and their families. There is no limit to the length of stay in the apartments.

Monetary donations from the organization’s annual gala and online donations go toward renting units where none are available, welcome baskets, gift cards, and baskets and meals provided on Veterans’ Day and Thanksgiving. “We are spending essentially everything that we raise during our annual fund-raiser, so to the extent that people are willing to make donations, just about 97 cents on the dollar goes directly to benefiting these service members,” says Samuel. “And as of today we’ve housed over 100 service members and their families.”

Homes Fit for Heroes recently expanded its reach to include the H.E.R.O. Program, recently launched by the Department of Homeland Security and Special Operations Command, which trains wounded service members to combat child pornography and child predators on the Internet. The program includes training followed by a nine-month unpaid internship at law enforcement agencies across the U.S., with the goal of employment at those agencies after the internship. Many service members have the skills to succeed in the program, but not the financial resources to pay their own housing expenses for such a long stretch.

The Raias “saw a need,” consultant Baskin says. “They saw that they had an ability to meet that need. And they just started doing it. And I think that they would probably tell you it’s grown in ways that were unexpected for them, but it’s something they felt deeply committed to do.”

 

A reunited family

Homes Fit for Heroes helped Sergeant First Class David Lau and his family by providing an apartment in San Antonio, Texas, while Lau recovered from severe trauma after a suicide bomber blast in Afghanistan in 2012.

To be by his side during the month he spent in the hospital, Lau’s wife had left their young children with family friends back in their home state of Washington. The military’s family housing had a long waiting list. Lau’s wife, Hamide, needed to return to their children, but without her aid, he would have had to stay in the hospital. The family was able to reunite because of Homes Fit for Heroes.

Lau recalls the first time he and his wife saw their San Antonio home. “We go to this apartment and my wife starts crying,” Lau says. “She just loses it. It’s a beautiful apartment, it’s in a good school district for the kids, and they already have it stocked. It’s fully furnished. Lots of furniture. All we [have] to do is walk in the place. It has been one of the biggest blessings of my life.”

In 2012, Lau, who was deployed with the Washington National Guard, was part of a Special Forces unit on a combat adviser mission in Afghanistan, embedded with an Afghan unit to mentor. On April 12, he was on a joint patrol gathering intelligence in the city of Meymana in northern Afghanistan.

It was market day in the city, and the streets were crowded. No one that day sensed the impending danger—not the Americans, not the Afghan forces and not the civilians who were out in numbers. “Everything went black and I woke up on my face, kind of across the street because the blast had thrown me quite some ways,” says Lau, who was 37 at the time of the incident.

Lau was close enough to the bomber that all the air had been pushed out of his lungs, and he wasn’t breathing. When he regained consciousness, he forced himself to inhale. “When I exhaled that first breath of air, it was a prayer, I said, ‘Please, God, don’t let me die,’ ” he says.

He was burned and his body was full of holes made by the ball bearings that had covered the suicide bomber’s vest. His legs were mangled, his brachial and femoral arteries had been severed, and the meat had essentially been blasted off his hand, leaving it looking “like a Halloween prop,” he says. Despite his profound injuries and blood loss, he was able to apply tourniquets to his legs and stabilize himself until help arrived. About a week later he found himself in a hospital bed in San Antonio. Somehow the surgeons were able to rebuild his legs and hand. A month later the hospital was ready to discharge him to help prevent risk of hospital-borne infections, but he needed round-the-clock care.

Lau says the last time he used a wheelchair was the day his children were able to join him and his wife in San Antonio. “They were coming in to the airport, and I was supposed to be in a wheelchair for a couple months after that, but I told my wife, ‘I cannot let my kids see me in this wheelchair,’ ” Lau recalls. He fought through the pain, using a walker to meet his children at the airport. “I never sat back down in [the wheelchair] again because I knew how much it would affect them mentally to see their dad—to them I’m their superhero—for them to see me in a wheelchair. I didn’t want what happened to me to affect them that much.”

Without the apartment that Homes Fit for Heroes provided, “I wouldn’t have had my kids there, and I would have sat in that wheelchair longer,” Lau says. “I would have had no motivation, no reason, to get up out of that chair as fast as I did.” Lau is being medically retired, and the family will return to their home state of Washington soon.

Another service member assisted by Homes Fit for Heroes, Army Ranger Sergeant First Class Cory Remsberg, was honored by President Obama in the State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2014.

 

Philanthropy: A core value

Philanthropy is one of the core values listed on Raia Properties’ website. “That family’s been so gracious,” Lau says of the Raias. “To me, it’s so weird because all I want to do is express my thanks to them … [but] they’ll say, ‘Don’t thank us. We are trying to thank you for what you’ve done.’ “

The wounded military members “have given so much, and given it without hesitation, and I think we’re, we’re honored to be a small part of repaying them,” says Lawrence Raia.
“Our family has been extraordinarily supportive of these efforts,” says Samuel Raia. “We’ve been really very fortunate in business and to have the success that we’ve had, and to be able to reach out to those that really put their lives on the line for us on a daily basis is more than we can ever hope for.”

Sally M. Snell is a writer based in Lawrence, Kan.

 


Copyright 2014 by Family Business Magazine. This article may not be posted online or reproduced in any form, including photocopy, without permission from the publisher. For reprint information, contact bwenger@familybusinessmagazine.com.

 

 

 

 

About the Author(s)

This is your 1st of 5 free articles this month.

Introductory offer: Unlimited digital access for $5/month
4
Articles Remaining
Already a subscriber? Please sign in here.

Related Articles

KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY

The Family Business newsletter. Weekly insight for family business leaders and owners to improve their family dynamics and their businesses.