On a visionary’s blueprints, an abandoned Little Rock high-rise transforms easily into a home for nearly 100 pregnant teens.
Julius James Larry III, a 63-year-old casket company owner from Houston, says the planned Ida B. Wells Home for Pregnant Girls is a calling from God that he received when diagnosed with cancer three years ago.
But community resistance, critical state officials and the felony background of Larry, who is promoting the project, make for a complicated proposal that is to go before the Little Rock Planning Commission on Thursday.
Residents near the proposed site are concerned about whether Larry and his partners can follow through on their promise to rehabilitate the former Job Corps building on Vance Street, an eyesore full of asbestos and mold that has been vacant more than five years.
Arkansas Department of Human Services officials say Larry’s involvement and felony theft conviction jeopardize the part of the plan that calls for the state to allow - and pay a perday rate for - teens in foster care to live in the girls home.
The state also isn’t sold on how the home would operate.
Larry has dismissed some of the concerns, saying that he has solutions to state officials’ unease with his past and has the money available to pacify critical neighbors and follow through with establishing the girls home.
But some of the commitments that Larry says are part of the plan for the home and other ventures in Little Rock couldn’t be ver-ified with public records or interviews conducted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette over a series of months.
UNDER ONE ROOF
The former Job Corps building is a poster child of blight, with boarded-up windows and a history of code-enforcement complaints.
But sitting in his office on 12th Street in mid-June, Larry said the building is an opportunity.
He has spent hours, he said, gathering experts in education, health care, pregnancy and at-risk youths to write a plan to house, educate and provide job skills for the expectant mothers, who must be under 21 and would come from across the state.
Architectural plans that he provided show a complete remodel of the decrepit building. They include a beauty salon, law offices, classrooms, a gymnasium and space for the offices of his newly established newspaper, along with a restaurant and commercial kitchen that would be under contract to provide meals for the girls.
Floors three through six would be dedicated to the girls home, which would provide a stable living environment for the pregnant teens, Larry said. Each floor would house 24 girls and a floor supervisor in dormitory-style quarters. Each floor also would have its own medical station to handle routine care, he said.
A more extensive medical facility is planned for the seventh floor, where there’s room for transitional housing for about 14 mothers after they give birth. There also would be a birthing suite for girls who couldn’t make it to the hospital, he said.
In addition to the home in the main building, an outer building on the property would be turned into a coin-operated laundry or another retail use. An empty apartment building on Roosevelt Road and State Street would be converted into condominiums for the new mothers to move into once they can support themselves, he said.
The home would be open to any girls who met the program’s criteria, but those in foster care would be a large part of the home’s target population, Larry said.
“What we want to do is take [pregnant teenagers] out of foster homes,” he said. “Instead of having DHS locate say 30 foster homes for 30 girls, don’t worry about it. We bring them all under one roof at the Ida B. Wells Home.”
The home’s plan sets aside office space for Human Services Department caseworkers. The plan also calls for the home to take in state money for housing the foster-care girls, he said.
“I would envision that the same dollars - and we might be able to do it for less - that they’re giving to the different foster homes to take care of the girls, just give it to us, and we’ll just take care of it right there,” Larry said.
But Larry’s big dream faces a number of hurdles, state officials say - the biggest being his felony conviction.
‘THAT’S HISTORY’
According to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records, Larry was sentenced to 19 years in prison for felony theft in 1997 and served about eight years of that sentence before being released on parole.
A Harris County, Texas, jury in Houston convicted Larry of taking more than $529,000 in checks from a roofing company, GAF Materials Corp., and diverting the checks into a bank account that only he controlled, court records show.
Bill Moore, the prosecutor in the Harris County district attorney’s office who handled Larry’s case and those of two co-conspirators, said Larry and his co-conspirators did a good job of hiding where the money went.
“We never recovered any of it,” Moore said.
Larry hasn’t mentioned his criminal record in public discussions about the proposed girls home.
Although he’s on parole through 2016, he doesn’t think his felony background is relevant, he said, adding that he is innocent of the charge.
“That’s history,” he said.“Can’t do a thing about it. And I don’t live in the past.”
Regardless, if Larry remains involved with the home, his felony conviction will preclude the program from receiving any state money, Human Services Department spokesman Amy Webb said.
“Our Division of Children and Family Services does not do business with convicted felons, and we are prohibited from awarding money or the custody of foster children to someone who has a felony criminal background,” Webb said.
That means that the home wouldn’t qualify to receive per-day payments and that the Human Services Department would not allow any of its children to be placed there, if Larry remains an organizer and registered agent of the company that he and a partner set up to administer the home.
In mid-June, Larry said if his involvement became a problem, he would step back from having a role in the home and let his partner, Texas attorney Veryl Brown, run it.
“I don’t care what they may think about me. I want to know what they think about the program,” he said.
Larry said he has incorporated suggestions from Human Services Department officials into his plan for the home.
In the first issue of a community newspaper that he published in mid-June, Larry touted a meeting with those officials, who he said were “excited” about the project. The full-page newspaper spread asking for support for the home includes a photo from that meeting.
Webb said a staff member who runs the department’s transitional youth division met with Larry about the program, but it wasn’t an endorsement of the plan.
Even if Larry isn’t involved, the Human Services Department has several problems with how the home would function, Webb said.
“We do not wish to institutionalize youth in our foster-care system in a large institutional setting,” Webb said. “We try whenever possible to get them in a residential home with a family. We believe that is the most appropriate and best setting for them.”
Little Rock planning officials also have expressed concern about Larry’s proposal.
Staff members at the city’s Planning and Development Department have recommended denying the rezoning request because the plan would be “too intense” for the neighborhood.
Neighbors who, Larry said, are in favor of the girls home did not return emails and phone calls.
The Pettaway Neighborhood Association, located nearest to the building, voted in May to oppose the plan. Several association members have voiced concern at public meetings about security, curfews, traffic, noise and the effect on their neighborhood.
They’ve also questioned whether Larry and his partners have the money to renovate the building.
‘INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY’
Larry and one of his partners, Houston funeral-home owner Michael Bill, said they have about $1.5 million available for renovating the building, but he declined to say where it all came from.
“I’m not at liberty to really discuss that because the private [donors] have asked that they don’t be revealed,” Bill said.
Larry said some of the money already spent on putting the girls-home plan together came from his casket company, but he declined to provide additional detailsabout the money on hand for renovation.
He and Bill did give a general outline of expected future revenue sources for the girls home, which Larry estimated will require $10 million to $15 million on top of initial renovation costs.
Much of the money would come from ministries that the partners run in Texas, Larry said.
For Larry, that is Paradise-Victory Cathedral World Ministries, which he said hasn’t taken in any donations or done any business since its creation in mid-2012.
Bill said his ministry, Houston SHOP Ministries - the acronym stands for Sweet Hour of Prayer - will provide some money from donations.
But the largest part of his ministry’s support for the home will come from Mardi Gras festivals it plans to hold in Houston and other cities across the U.S. beginning next year, Bill said. One of those festivals is planned for Little Rock, he said.
“We’re going to come in and have businesses to sponsor signature packages, and we’re going to do a big to-do in one of your major parks there, and that money will go to funding Ida B. Wells school,” he said.
The third ministry, called King’s Blood Ministries, is operated by Brown, the Texas lawyer whom Larry identifies as a partner in the proposed girls home.
In planning documents, Larry wrote that King’s Blood Ministries is a Texas nonprofit corporation in good standing.
But the Texas secretary of state’s office, which registers nonprofits in the state, shows no record of a nonprofit named King’s Blood Ministries. The ministry also isn’t among entities that list Brown as the registered agent in the state.
Brown did not return phone messages left on separate occasions with a staff member at his law f irm over two weeks. The Democrat-Gazette tried to locate nonprofit federal tax filings for the ministry but could not find them.
During a mid-June interview, Larry said he expects the nonprofit ministries to be a stable source of revenue for the home because his casket company has been successful and the other partners are “independently wealthy.”
He also plans to send letters to television personality Oprah Winfrey, mega-church preachers Joel and Victoria Osteen, preacher T.D. Jakes and other mega-churches and abortion opponents who he believes will support the home.
The home will form the basis for the rest of Larry’s plan for Little Rock, he said.
MULTIPLE BUSINESSES
Larry has set up businesses in Houston, where he lives, as well as in Little Rock and a handful of other cities, although calls, court records and in-person visits to some of those businesses showed that they are no longer operating at the addresses they list in public documents.
Larry, who holds degrees in dentistry and law, has run businesses in Texas and Georgia, including Paradise South Casket Co., which opened a Little Rock office in 2009.
In the past six months, Larry and his partners have registered at least five different companies in Arkansas: two newspapers, one each in Little Rock and Pine Bluff; American Pilot Services LLC; the Ida B. Wells Home; and a company named The Paradise Group LLC.
In some documents submitted to the Planning Commission, The Paradise Group is identified as the building’s purchaser, but Larry said in an interview that the group would only administer the home, not own it.
The ministries run by Larry and his partners would own the building, he said, if they can purchase it from its current owner, Remi Enterprises of San Antonio. The purchase agreement is contingent upon Planning Commission approval of the rezoning request.
Reached by phone Wednesday, B.P. Agrawal, the owner of Remi Enterprises, confirmed the pending purchase, saying it was contingent on “plenty of things,” including the rezoning approval.
Agrawal said he isn’t involved in the girls home and wouldn’t be providing any monetary support for it. He declined to answer further questions about the building until after the Planning Commission’s decision.
If the Planning Commission approves the rezoning request and there’s no further opposition to the project, Larry said, the first phase would be gutting the building, followed by reconstruction of the first three floors.
If the commission votes against the request to change the property’s zoning from general commercial and office to a planned commercial district, the partners can appeal the decision to the Little Rock Board of Directors.
If the directors also vote down the proposal, Larry said he won’t abandon the plan for the girls home but will instead look for a different Little Rock location for it.
In addition to the Job Corps building deal, Larry said he sent a letter of intent to buy the Joshua building on Roosevelt Road and State Street and turn it into transitional housing for girls once they leave the Ida B. Wells Home. He also calls attention to The Paradise Group’s “purchasing” of the building in his full-page newspaper spread.
Mike South, the real estate agent with Flake & Kelley Commercial representing the Joshua building, said the letter was not accepted by the current owners because it asked them to finance a majority of the purchase.
“Honestly, we haven’t heard back from Larry in a month or two, and we’re actively looking for other buyers,” South said in late June. “He sent us a letter, and frankly the price was acceptable, but not the terms.”
South said the owners wanted a “substantial down payment” and would finance a small portion of the building’s cost. He said Larry never responded to that counteroffer.
Larry also said he’s had discussions with a representative of the owners of the Donaghey building on Seventh and Main streets in downtown Little Rock, which is for sale at $5 million.
But Charles Hendrix, who owns the building, said he didn’t know about any meeting between Larry or someone representing him in the building’s sale. Regardless, the idea of housing single mothers in the building was news to him, he said.
“That is not something that we’re interested in, not at all,” Hendrix said. “I have no idea who this man is.”
Those land deals aside, Larry said he has ideas for other projects in Little Rock, which he called the new Atlanta.
He said he has plans to attract friends with money to invest in Little Rock, starting with such projects as a black country club and condos where professional athletes can spend some of their wealth.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/07/2013