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acquire this and get permission from the city to CLOSE this short
street, in order to have room to build our new dining hall.
Already our students are jammed into first floor Mayfair, as
our outgrown dining hall. Our cooks have to cook food for 250
students three times a day in a kitchen designed and built for a
family of three or four. Even so, we have planned to keep
squeezing into this overcrowded space another year or more until
we can build the new dining hall--but even if we delay building the
new hall, WE MUST BUILD IT in a year or two, or have no room to
feed our students.
We signed up the owner of this lot and paid the deposit. He
signed the real-estate broker's agreement. But before our broker
got him into the escrow office to sign the escrow papers, his wife
was taken to the hospital with an illness, and until now these
papers have not been signed. Now the broker representing this
factory has offered them one-third MORE than our price--and for
CASH. Also he demands an entrance through this dead-end street, so
we could never close it. It would completely ruin our college
campus.
This is only one example. We have our own Real Estate
department, headed by a licensed and thoroughly experienced leading
broker. He advises me that the situation is now such that we must
MOVE FAST, and tie up several additional parcels of ground--mostly
in a district of 50-foot lots, with one or two old houses on each--
with OPTIONS, in order to prevent having to purchase many of them
outright for CASH at a greatly inflated and exorbitant figure. We
must get to these owners before the opposition broker does.
To help do this we can, if there is no other recourse, borrow
a certain amount of a bank or loan company, by mortgaging some of
our property which is paid out, or almost paid out. But such loans
cost us heavy fees for appraisals, for making the loans, and then
a high rate of interest beside--probably 6.6% or 7%.
Co-Workers, if you will really take this emergency to heart
and help us, I hope we can avoid having to make such loans--and we
cannot borrow enough by this method to handle the situation, even
if we do!
I have to ask you three things.
1) All of you to try to send in still more, even at
sacrifice, IMMEDIATELY, beside the most liberal offerings you
possibly can during May and June, and after. I think many of us
can squeeze things to send in a little more--as much more as
possible.
2) Several of you, who are in position to do so, to loan to
this work the largest sums you can. Several of our Co-Workers have
a good sum of money, which you may be unable to GIVE, because you
are forced to use the income or interest from it to live on. It
might be in the form of bonds, or stocks, or cash, or other
investments. In a few instances in the past, we have found a way
by which this capital may be put to work, being used in GOD'S WORK,