Attorney & Counselor, Eric Gomez leads Foster Village through Complex Real Estate Rezoning
Attorney & Counselor, Eric Gomez, like many of his colleagues at Braun & Gresham, also serves within his community. For Gomez, it’s as a board member for Foster Village, an Austin-based nonprofit working to bridge gaps for foster families through community engagement and support. Gomez initially got involved with Foster Village because of his personal experience as a former foster youth; he got even more involved when the organization began its search for new space in North Austin to accommodate its growth.
“Their lease in North Austin was ending, and they needed a new, bigger center, but real estate – especially in Austin proper – is at a premium,” Gomez recalls. “They’re very much a nonprofit – it’s a struggle for them just to pay their staff below-market wages.”
Foster Village was founded in 2016 by Chief Executive Officer Chrystal Smith, a parent educator who, with her husband, had become a licensed foster home. Once they became insiders in the foster system, the Smiths’ eyes were newly opened to the depth and breadth of its deficiencies.
“The pipeline of kids in foster care to homelessness, human trafficking, and the prison population is unbelievable,” says Smith. “I grew up in a home full of adversity, so I understand the value of having community support and education around parenting and child development. We launched Foster Village in storage units, then moved to our first resource center in Dripping Springs, just southwest of Austin.”
The Challenge
At Foster Village resource centers, foster families can visit and access essential items – like beds, car seats, or clothing – for free. Specializing in trauma-informed care, staff members also connect foster families with continuing therapeutic support services, and advocate for a more dignified system for kids and families in crisis.
As the organization began to grow, it expanded into North Austin, moving in 2019 into a house – what Smith calls “a hallmark of our model: a homelike environment where families and kids who are walking through extremely tough times can come and gather all the resources they need.” But their requests for services continued to skyrocket, with the number of foster families being served at the North Austin facility growing by more than 30% each year.
“We were just bursting at the seams there,” Smith explains. “And our lease was ending, so we put together a search committee to find a permanent North Austin home base. But nothing was within our budget, nothing was homelike – we just hit a lot of dead ends.”
A Community Ally
Then, almost miraculously, a benefactor appeared. A fellow nonprofit founder with about 18 acres of North Austin property had recently relocated to the West Coast, and was deciding what to do with his high-value land.
“He felt there was a legacy to the land that he wanted to preserve,” notes Smith. “He was approached by commercial developers who were offering him upwards of $10 million, but he felt a strong prompting that this property was meant to be used for kids in the community who needed access to its natural beauty.”
Smith shared her vision for Foster Village with the benefactor – their curriculum for therapeutic camps but lack of someplace to host them, their already-underway nationwide expansion with affiliate locations but lack of somewhere large enough to conduct trainings – and it aligned with what he had hoped for his property.
“He told us, ‘I know this land is intended for Foster Village,’” Smith remembers. “We entered a purchase agreement for him to sell it to us for only what his debt is on the property – a fraction of its actual market value.”
But things are rarely as easy as they seem, and this purchasae was no exception. The biggest barrier was that the land was zoned for residential rather than commercial use, and rezoning a property is an extremely complex and difficult process, particularly in Austin. And there was more.
The Process
“The land is surrounded by a neighborhood that had just gone through a similar situation with a for-profit company that handled it all really badly, and the neighborhood was burned by that rezoning,” Gomez elaborates. “So they were like, ‘Here we go again – they’re going to skirt all the issues and take advantage of our neighborhood.”
But Eric Gomez wasn’t going to let that happen. Brought into the deal by Foster Village because of his real-estate expertise, Gomez also understood both the grassroots work and the political maneuvering needed for this sale to succeed.
“First, with the neighborhood, we communicated with community leaders, sent updates to the neighbors, tried to be as transparent as possible and keep them in the loop,” he notes. “Then, we talked with the district’s City Council member, and fortunately, they loved the idea and what Foster Village was doing, and they agreed to champion the rezoning application – so that it was the City of Austin, rather than us, proposing the rezoning, which rarely happens.”
The proposal went through the Planning Commission and the Zoning & Platting Commission, and Gomez and his team appeared at City Hall to state their case. The deal was unanimously approved at each step, and not only did the property get rezoned, but also, the City waived its application fees, saving Foster Village about $15,000.
“This sort of project is not so much a science as an art form – it’s complicated,” attests Gomez. “Trying to rezone and prepare a property for commercial use is difficult. And it doesn’t matter what your merits are, you still have to do the politics. Other attorneys may be familiar with the rezoning process, but I used to work at the City of Austin. Having those relationships, and being able to sell the city on the project and its benefits, to get around red tape, was crucial.”
Today, Foster Village has a new North Austin resource center, with a nationwide headquarters and training center and a youth camp still to come – and the way the project came together saved the organization a lot of frustration, heartache, and money.
A New Beginning Lead by Braun & Gresham
“Eric’s knowledge, experience, and connections took us from ‘how do we even begin?’ to the City leading the charge for us, which was such a huge blessing,” Smith effuses. “Eric is an incredibly steady presence and has a kind of calming leadership style. When he says he’s going to do something, then he’s going to follow through and do it in the briefest amount of time and to the highest quality, every time.
“The whole Braun & Gresham team is just so professional and reliable,” she continues. “They give back to the community in so many ways – they even help sponsor our events. But the most important thing they’ve done for Foster Village is ensure that we can do our work by doing what they do best.”
The City of Austin believed in the Foster Village project so much that it’s using the deal as an archetype to help other nonprofits gain an easier path to achieving similar goals for their organizations.
“We’re hoping this effort creates a ripple effect that leads to a lot of good for all Austin-area nonprofits,” concludes Gomez. “One of the best things about my job is that the work we do shapes the communities we’re part of in a tangible way. So Braun & Gresham has been a partner in establishing a hub for foster families with tremendous need to receive resources and support, and find community.”
Discover how Braun & Gresham’s Eric Gomez can help you through Complex Real Estate Rezoning and Transactions.