21 January 2024
When Marvin Plakut pitched the Seabury senior housing development, even some of St. Paul’s most diehard community advocates were taken aback by what seemed like a tall gamble.
“There had been no new housing on University Avenue in 50 years,” said Plakut, who oversaw the opening of the 49-unit affordable-housing community at University and Fairview avenues in 2002, 14 years before the arrival of the light-rail corridor outside its doors.
Marvin Plakut, 69, will retire as chief executive officer and president of Episcopal Homes in March 2024, having led the organization since 1999. (Courtesy of Episcopal Homes)
So Plakut, the president and chief executive officer of Episcopal Homes, kept pitching senior apartment buildings along a business corridor that some long-standing commercial interests were abandoning.
Carty Heights, Kings Crossing, the Terrace at Iris Park and more — one after another, each opened their doors to St. Paul’s eldest residents during his 25 years with the organization.
Plakut, 69, has announced he will retire at the end of March, and he’ll be leaving the 130-year-old nonprofit senior housing provider transformed.
A mix of affordable, market-rate senior housing
In addition to expanding its original two properties during Plakut’s tenure, Episcopal Homes added 146 market-rate and 256 affordable-housing units in seven locations directly on or just off University Avenue in St. Paul and the Green Line corridor, which rolled out in 2014.
With middle-income and low-income neighborhoods to the north and pricier areas like Macalester-Groveland and Highland Park situated to the south, University Avenue struck him as the perfect setting to build a mix of affordable and market-rate senior housing on a continuum of both care and affordability, ranging from independent living to assisted living, nursing homes and memory care. An aging client could simply move next door from building to building as their needs changed.
“The key reason was this — stand-alone nursing homes were really struggling. Increasingly, clients preferred organizations where there was a continuum of care,” Plakut said on Thursday. “They feed one another. There’s a natural bridge that residents need as their health or frailty fluctuates.”
In the past 25 years, with that strategy in mind, Plakut has overseen construction of seven affordable and market-rate senior housing developments, jump-starting real estate investment on a business corridor that had lost its signature car dealerships and other commercial anchors throughout the 1990s. Where others had given up, Plakut saw opportunity.
“I want to live here some day,” he said.
From Porky’s to COVID
Plakut, a former transitional care administrator for HealthEast, has had to make some tough calls in his career, including navigating the COVID-19 pandemic while protecting the most vulnerable population outside of hospital care. A decade prior, he negotiated the acquisition of expansion property that hosted the venerated Porky’s drive-in — a 1950s-style magnet for fans of cheap burgers and classic cars — over the outrage of vintage automobile enthusiasts.
“It’s this simple: the Porky’s owners wanted out,” he said. “They came to us and said, ‘We want to sell, do you want to buy?’ We said yes. But we got portrayed, to a degree, as the bad guys. We didn’t force them out. The nature of University Avenue was changing.”
And Episcopal Homes has been a key component of that change, adding some 500 new units of senior housing during his tenure. The property that hosted the former diner now hosts the Terrace at Iris Park, 62 units of independent senior housing that opened about a decade ago, just before the Green Line began rolling down University Avenue.
When Plakut became president and chief executive officer of Episcopal Homes in 1999, the organization ran two senior housing developments, Episcopal Church Home and Iris Park Commons, both of them situated along the avenue and within the capital city’s Midway neighborhood.
Across 25 years, a staff of 150 grew to become a staff of 650. Annual revenue of $4 million became $40 million. And some of the city’s most well-recognized public officials moved in, or moved their parents or in-laws in.
‘Home to many people’
Episcopal Homes has for years housed former Mayor George Latimer and former Ramsey County Commissioner Ruby Hunt, and previously housed the paternal grandparents of St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter III, including Melvin Carter Sr., a noted jazz musician.
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s in-laws have called the property home. Former St. Paul Mayor Jim Scheibel and Sue Hague, former chair of the Metropolitan Council, both sit on the nonprofit’s board of directors. Scheibel said he moved his 97-year-old mother into memory care at an Episcopal Homes building just a few weeks ago.
Plakut’s approach toward Episcopal Homes has “been more than successful,” Scheibel said. “It’s met a critical need in the city of St. Paul. It’s been home to many people and will be home to many others.”
“He knew how to make things happen,” Scheibel added.
The mission has expanded, as well. Episcopal Homes recently acquired the eight-bed Pillars Hospice Home in Oakdale, which offers end-of-life care. It also offers in-home or mobile hospice care to about 50 additional clients, meeting them in private residences, nursing homes or wherever they may be as they approach the end.
Architecture that engages
While developers in some low-income neighborhoods prefer walled-in structures that face away from the surrounding community, Plakut said he always preferred architecture and presentation that sought for greater public engagement.
“It’s not just about enriching lives and building communities with older adults,” he said. “It’s about revitalizing neighborhoods and investing in them.”
Since 2002, a whimsical bus shelter outside the main Episcopal Homes campus at University and Fairview avenues has sported three leaf-shaped metal benches beneath two giant, fabricated oak leaves, the colorful work of a Minneapolis artist commissioned by the nonprofit.
Interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, but to Plakut, the meaning is clear: “Nature is so big and we are so small.”
It took some convincing to get project partners like Model Cities and the Neighborhood Development Center to back Kings Crossing, a 49-unit, HUD-subsidized senior development that has anchored the corner of Dale and University avenues since 2011. Some community advocates balked, wanting to see instead residences that were more high-end constructed over a jazzy new restaurant.
But Plakut saw the need for affordable senior housing in Frogtown, as well as ground-level, public-facing commercial tenants that would appeal to local residents with moderate incomes.
Today, the art deco building dubbed Frogtown Square houses both Kings Crossing and everyday vendors like the Los Ocampo restaurant, the Grooming House barbershop, a Subway sandwich shop and the Global Food Market, a small East African-themed grocer.
“It’s the perfect front door to Frogtown,” Plakut said.
Even the Porky’s controversy ended on a bit of a high note in his eyes. After the red-and-white checkered drive-in closed in 2011, it was disassembled and relocated to the Little Log House Pioneer Village south of Hastings.
‘If I don’t leave now, I won’t get another chapter’
In 1996, Plakut’s wife, Darvia Herold, was moved by a competition in the Pioneer Press that sought written nominations for the male spouse or loved one with the best home cooking skills. She penned the following poem, which found its way into the printed newspaper:
“He’s a man of the nineties, there is no doubt,
In General Mills, he should have some clout,
He’s a father, a lover, a cook and a cleaner;
No one makes a meatloaf that is meaner.”
Plakut said his meatloaf is, in fact, nothing all that special, though it kept his three children fed.
As for his next steps, he has no intention of celebrating his retirement years by picking up a golf club, though he does plan to take his wife traveling.
“To me, the most vexing problem facing mankind is climate change,” he said. “I want to volunteer with organizations that are focused on mitigating climate change. I want another chapter in my life, and if I don’t leave now, I won’t get another chapter.”
Brian McMahon, a former executive of University United, a nonprofit community organization, said Plakut was a pleasure to work with.
“I was one of the new kids on the block talking about ‘transit-oriented development’ in 2000, and nobody knew what I was talking about,” McMahon recalled. “The accepted vision for University Avenue was what was there: one-story strip malls with parking lot after parking lot. And here comes Marvin Plakut with a multi-story development.”
McMahon said the project was a game-changer.
“From that point on, whenever I was out on the stump preaching transit-oriented development, I could say, ‘That’s what we should be getting — Episcopal Homes.’ He really became sort of a poster child for what the future of the University Avenue corridor would look like. He opened the door and set the bar.”
Tom Henry has been appointed by the board of Episcopal Homes to lead the 130-year-old nonprofit senior housing provider as its next president and chief executive officer. (Courtesy of Episcopal Homes)
The board of Episcopal Homes recently voted to install Tom Henry, the nonprofit’s current chief of strategy and financial officer, as the next president and CEO.
Henry, a former mental health practitioner and business consultant, received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in interdisciplinary studies with emphasis in social work and business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
Henry also holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, with concentrations in health care policy and nonprofit management.
Related Articles
St. Paul’s Hamm’s Brewery, Shoreview’s Rice Street Crossings projects among 10 Met Council grant recipients
Obituary: John Fridlington, CEO of St. Paul Area Association of Realtors
Rent control, tenants’ rights included on priority list for new St. Paul City Council
Construction to begin on 164-unit affordable housing property in Rosemount
Mortgage questions to ask and expect from your lender