About Darryl Fess
Darryl Fess, president and CEO of Brookline Bank, has hosted a series of interviews on his program "Daryl & Company" with local leaders. In these conversations, Fess discussed the affordable housing crisis with Habitat for Humanity Greater Boston CEO James Kostaras, noting that the bank has a long relationship with the organization. He also spoke with Boston Age Strong Commissioner Emily Shea about the bank's partnership to train branches to better serve older customers. With Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Rosalin Acosta, Fess discussed the state's low unemployment rate and workforce training programs. He interviewed Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology President Aisha Francis about the school's financial literacy partnership with the bank. Fess also spoke with New England Council CEO Jim Brett about the council's federal advocacy work, and with 2Life Communities President Amy Schectman about senior housing and the organization's COVID-19 response.
Fess has described Brookline Bank as a full-service commercial bank with 25 branches in and around Boston that competes with both regional and large national banks. He stated that the bank's philosophy includes doing "whatever needs to be done to make things right" for customers. In a 2019 interview on Radio Entrepreneurs, Fess said he believes in a "no job is too small" approach and noted that he makes his cell phone number available to customers.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Darryl Fess's recent appearances.
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Transcript (13 segments)
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Darryl Fess0:11
Hello and welcome to Daryl and Company. I'm pleased to welcome Jim Costaris, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Boston. Jim, happy you could join us here today.
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Jim Costaris0:24
Thank you, Daryl. It's a real pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me.
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Darryl Fess0:28
Jim, the lack of affordable housing in the Greater Boston area has been cited by elected officials, the business community, and housing advocates as a crisis that is mounting. How does the work at Habitat for Humanity of Greater Boston impact the affordable housing crisis?
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Jim Costaris0:44
Well, we focus on creating home ownership opportunities for low-income families. That's our mission. That's what we do. Home ownership is very important. We see that as a way to break the cycle of poverty. A lot of affordable housing, most of it is rental housing, which is fine. There's a need for that. But we're really addressing those low-income families that are working hard, struggling to take care of their kids, but despite all their hard work, simply don't have even close to an opportunity to actually own their own home. So that's what we do. We serve families. We do it by building homes. And we believe that we are part of what has to be a collective effort to face this very serious housing crisis. We're building more than we've ever built before. I certainly want to scale up. The need is great. We don't yet have enough homes for all the deserving families that need a home that come to us. So that's our goal for the mid to long term.
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Darryl Fess2:07
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think that your mission of providing housing that people own is really important because it does certainly give you a sense of worth and actually it builds some net worth over time. How do you decide on where you're going to build housing? What's the process like?
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Jim Costaris2:25
Well, our service area is Greater Boston, most of the metro area, and that includes neighborhoods right in the city, but we are building outside the city too in the suburbs. How do we find sites? To be very honest, we go where there's opportunities to buy land at a steep discount. We can't afford to buy vacant land on the market in this real estate market. It's really daunting. Land, like housing, is very expensive. We rely on cities and towns, municipal governments, to sell us land at a discount. We have to compete for those properties though. By law, cities and towns have to issue requests for proposals and invite developers to submit proposals and then evaluate them. So we're competing with real estate developers for those properties. I'm happy to report that we've been on a roll. Every property that we put a proposal in for, we've been selected. So that's something we're very proud of. And so to answer your question more directly, we build where land is available at a discount from municipal government. So currently we're building in Roxbury, Dorchester. We'll be building in Mattapan, Roslindale, Malden. We'll also be building in Weston next. Probably certainly next spring, if not sooner, we'll start construction on six homes in the town of Weston.
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Darryl Fess4:10
Wow, that's a lot you've got going on.
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Jim Costaris4:13
We do. We have a lot. We have about 36 homes in our pipeline. And to be honest, I want to increase that. I want us to be building many more homes every year because the need is so great.
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Darryl Fess4:28
If people want to contribute to Habitat, how can they go about doing that? And I'm just going to put a little plug in for you right now. Okay, thank you. Real estate developers, I'm going to tell them if they have some land excess, call you.
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Jim Costaris4:45
Yeah, Daryl, thank you so much for that. That would certainly mean a lot to us, and I appreciate that. So if people want to contribute, we rely entirely on the generosity of donors. We have not received grants or subsidies from city or state government. That's what I mean when I say we're self-financed. More accurately, we are financed by the generosity of many donors. So the best way to contribute would be to go to our website, which is habitatboston.org. That's one word, habitatboston.org. And we would be so grateful for that.
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Darryl Fess5:39
Fantastic. Jim, best of luck with the programs and thanks for joining me here today on Daryl and Company.
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Jim Costaris5:46
Thank you, Daryl. And I just want to thank Brookline Bank. We've had this long relationship with Brookline Bank, and we really value that relationship. The bank has just been really wonderful to us, and everybody at the bank has been wonderful to us. We appreciate that.
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Darryl Fess6:04
Great. We enjoyed doing it. So okay, great. Thank you to everyone else for watching Daryl and Company.
