AURORA | From the outside, the bland brown building at 1450 S. Havana St. looks like any 1970s-era office park that has been overshadowed by sleeker, big-box suburbia. Even the building’s ground floor has remained eerily empty since Wells Fargo left years ago.
But a row of six clocks in the main lobby that tell the time — in Amman, Jordan, Nairobi, Kenya, and Seoul, South Korea — reveal a different chapter for Havana Towers.
Devon Horan, the property manager for Havana Towers, said the vacancy rate has greatly decreased since his company took over the building three and a half years ago.
“At that time, the vacancy rate was large,” he said. “Then we got one tenant that was from one of the African nations. They have such a tight community that they talked to each other. Pretty soon that was the majority of people coming to us.”
Horan said when his company took over the building, it was only 20 percent occupied. Now he said it has increased to almost 75 percent occupied. Havana Towers today has more than 50 businesses scattered throughout its eight floors.
“I would say it’s mainly Somalis and Ethiopians,” he said of the businesses that have leased office space in the past three years.
Horan also reconfigured many of the offices to make them smaller, a move he said appealed to the businesses moving in, which were either startups or didn’t have a large number of employees.
“On the eighth floor I had one unit that was 4,000 square feet and I broke it up into 12 units, just small offices with a common waiting area. All of those leased almost immediately,” he said.
One reason Horan said the Towers work well for the immigrant business owners is the rent, which he said varies anywhere from $11 to $14 per square foot depending on the amenities.
As of the end of October, the retail price per square foot at The Gardens on Havana was nearly triple that price — $30 per square feet— according to Gayle Jetchick, executive director of the Havana Business Improvement District.
Having more office space and a convenient parking lot was why Community Enterprise Development Services — a company that provides recently arrived refugees with financial services, microloans and financial literacy programs — moved into the building from Denver last year.
“Parking was a problem for our clients and ourselves,” said Caster Mtwale, a program manager with CEDS, about the nonprofit’s former downtown location at 16th Street and Downing Street.
She said when the nonprofit moved from Denver last November, they didn’t have the training rooms, mountain views and lobby area visitors now see when they visit the nonprofit’s space on the fifth floor.
But Mtwale said the biggest reason the organization wanted to relocate to Aurora is that most of their clients live in the city, where one in four residents are foreign-born.
“We have seen huge client volume since we moved here,” she said. “Before when we were in Denver, we had to go do lots of outreach to make ourselves noticed. But now they just swamp this place.”
Mtwale, who manages what the nonprofit calls an “individual development account” program, said October has been her busiest month yet.
“This program is a match account program. It wants to help people who are starting businesses or want to expand businesses to buy their first vehicles, to purchase a home, and for people who want to go to school and get vocational training,” she said.
Under the program, refugees who have moved to the United States in the past five years can come in with $4,000 and have that money matched for a home purchase or a small business use. A refugee can also come in and start a savings account with the CEDS until they have enough money to get a matching amount.
“We open accounts with Key Bank. We process the paperwork, send (participants) there, they open the account and they save monthly. When they reach $4,000, we match them. That’s not a loan, they just pay us back,” she said.
Refugees who want to own a vehicle can also have up to $2,000 matched as part of the IDA program, Mtwale said.
Throughout the program, participants are required to attend financial training courses, where they learn about savings accounts with banks, credit scores, investment and tax returns.
Mtwale said the nonprofit is now looking to expand beyond serving Aurora’s refugees and working with low-income residents because their programs have proven to be so successful and popular. About five months ago, the nonprofit also became an SBA lender and can now provide loans of up to $50,000 for small businesses.
“For that you don’t need to be a refugee, anyone can apply,” she said.
The move to Havana Towers has been a boon to all of the services CEDS offers, said Daniel Woldu, who manages microloans for the nonprofit. Right now he said he is working on six microloans, which are very small, short-term loans offered at low interest for businesses. He said when CEDS was located in Denver, he would working on no more than one or two loans at a time.
“This is a well-known building,” he said. “You can tell everybody who lives in Aurora, you know the Wells Fargo building on Havana. There’s no sign anymore, but people still identify the building as the Wells Fargo building.”
Woldu said Havana Towers’ proximity to the chain stores, such as Sprouts and Target, that make up the Havana Business Improvement District also draws new people in.
“People hang out at the Starbucks near here. Then you come to this building, where if you want insurance, there’s an insurance agency. You have a travel agency here, you have a salon downstairs.”
CEDS also has worked with other businesses in the building since moving in last year, Woldu said.
He said the nonprofit has provided microloans to people working for Mile High Cabs, located a floor below. The bulk of the company’s drivers are East African immigrants who come to the United States hoping to make it on their own.
“They serve so many people. They may be one company, but the impact that company has helps hundreds of families,” Woldu said.
Woldu said CEDS has also provided microloans to refugees who work for one of the two truck dispatching companies located on the eighth floor and need to purchase a vehicle.
Just next door to CEDS is Anna’s Hair Braiding & Salon. Behind what looks like any mundane office door are rows of wigs, extension products and colorful beads for waists, hands and feet dangling from a wire frame.
Owner Anna Bonsu said she sees about five to six clients a day for styles that range from kinky twists to cornrows to tree braids. She said some braids can take more than four hours, but that most take her about two and half hours.
“I’m fast,” said Bonsu, who is originally from Ghana, and said she trained for six years in the country to learn the art.
She said she moved to the building about seven years ago after doing braiding from her home nearby. She said the fact that her business is somewhat hidden on the fifth floor in the massive building has never been an issue.
“I had customers before I moved here. I didn’t need to advertise,” she said. Today she also has a website, where she said new customers visit her based on the reviews that are posted.
Jetchick said the Havana Business Improvement District — which consists of more than 500 businesses along the street’s 4.3-mile stretch from East Sixth Avenue to Dartmouth Avenue — does well year after year because of the strip’s plethora of small, immigrant-owned businesses. According to the Havana BID’s 2015 annual report, the businesses accounted for 12.3 percent of the city’s total sales tax revenue in 2014 at nearly $500 million.