Learn how Yaphett El-Amin is driving change through Efficacy Consulting’s approach to community development and empowerment.
When the homepage of Efficacy Consulting & Development opens, inquisitive eyes land on an image of a pair of African American hands, gently and proudly cradling an eye-catching, modern-looking, multi-level dark gray home adorned with a white door and accenting white trimmed windows with a spacious porch framed with white lattice.
What is the picture saying?
The message describes the meaning of “efficacy” in the company’s name – “the ability to produce the intended result.” It is no small thing for Efficacy Consulting and Development to employ such a high-yielding word as its business mantra.
As a Minority and Female-owned MWBE (Minority/Women-owned Business Enterprises) certified company established in 2007, Efficacy Consulting & Development (ECD) focuses on providing quality, affordable housing, extraordinary real estate development, and personable community service in urban and rural communities. Delivering satisfaction is what the company does well.
“The Efficacy team is best known for its strength and acute understanding of urban communities,” says ECD President Yaphett El-Amin. “Living by our motto of ‘Building whole communities from the inside out,’ truly defines who we are with an understanding of what it takes to build organic holistic communities that provide focused enriched services to its people.”
ECD provides a plethora of real estate and community-based services. The real estate side includes residential and commercial, single-family homes, townhomes, and special needs housing services (Americans with Disability Act or ADA compliant).
The community-based service side includes diversity business and workforce compliance and monitoring, government relations, urban planning, and veterans and senior citizens budget assisted living.
Efficacy partners with a host of state and local governmental entities, private enterprises, non-profits, community organizations, and financial institutions to make it all work.
El-Amin says Efficacy is often engaged from the beginning of a development once a need is identified.
“We assess with laser focus, opportunities to assist owners in determining the target market, financing, and positioning for a project,” she continues. “Ensuring that our clients understand how to best structure the project to respond to the market and its varying factors, are our next level of engagement.
A sampling of ECD portfolio features:
Village at Delmar Place: An interesting combination of three and four-bedroom affordable rent-to-own townhomes, combined with two and three-bedroom rental flats in the City of St. Louis creates a social and economic mix that enriches this older neighborhood.
Scott Manor: Affordable housing is seeing real change in North St. Louis County with the opening of Scott Manor, the area’s finest newer mixed-use, affordable senior independent living community at 2131 Chambers & New Halls Ferry Roads.
Finney Place: Affordable housing community, completed in 2020 in the Vandeventer Neighborhood of St. Louis. The community’s 40 single-family homes include 26 three-bedroom homes, 13 four-bedroom homes, and one shared community house with an apartment on the second floor.
The New Broadview: A $44 million redevelopment project of the historic Broadview Hotel broke ground in Downtown East St. Louis in March 2023. The Broadview Hotel first opened in the 1920s. Nearly a century later, it’s in desperate need of a makeover.
In an interview on KSDK Channel 5 in St. Louis at the groundbreaking, El-Amin says the project will add 200 jobs and $100 million in construction revenue to the East St. Louis area.
When completed, the New Broadview will consist of 110 units, 97 one-bedroom, 13 two-bedroom, 11 Veteran bedroom units, 20,000 square feet of commercial space, 10 business offices, 20 business tabling spaces, a business conference room, senior technology center, mega kitchen, and modern public space.
“The real victory will be when the 110 families stand in this building and we see the faces of mature adults who sacrifice for this community,” says El-Amin, in the interview with KSDK. “We are looking for that juice and sandwich shop owner. Entrepreneurs with that spirit are ready to go. We are looking to you coming to the new Broadview.”
Completed in 1927, the Broadview, a seven-story Classical Revival fireproof hotel was built at a time in which East St. Louis was investing in making over the city’s architecture and political culture following the devastating 1917 race riot. The Broadview was the city’s largest and finest hotel; the Broadview helped solidify the status of East St. Louis as an emerging large city and as Illinois’s largest downstate city. The Broadview Hotel was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in December 2013.
In December 2017, the East Saint Louis City Council accepted Efficacy Consulting’s redevelopment plan for The New Broadview; and in February 2018, the City of East Saint Louis and Efficacy Consulting, LLC entered into a 99-year Lease-Purchase agreement.
“Thus, the New Broadview once re-developed will serve as the catalyst for the revitalization of Downtown East St. Louis,” El-Amin says. The redevelopment of the New Broadview is projected to be completed early next year.
El-Amin has more than twenty years of experience providing community diversity, equity, and inclusion services in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. She has led with a focus toward building working relationships with area stakeholders that enhance and increase the overall vitality of the community. She has earned numerous honors for her work in the community, including President Obama’s Volunteer Service Award for exceptional commitment to serving others.
Efficacy stands ready to engage stakeholders from grassroots to corporate levels to fulfill their community development needs, El-Amin says.
“Our team values the thoughts and needs of our clients,” she says. “By absorbing and expanding on these thoughts, we bring a unique style of synergy that creates universal development projects that aim to revitalize underutilized sites in core urban areas.”
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