Rejecting the American dream to help the needy

VANCOUVER, Wash. — Korry Holtzlander achieved the American Dream, and it grossed him out.

“I was making six figures, and my wife is a cardiac nurse and she was doing well, too,” said the former roofing business owner and sales executive at Curt Warner Chevrolet. “And we just got more and more miserable. It wasn’t working. It was a dead end.”

Now Holtzlander is living with less and operating a startup thrift store aimed at getting goods and money to people and agencies in need.

The Regifting Store is 7,500 square feet of retail space in Vancouver’s McLoughlin Heights. Beneficiaries of the store include everyone from homeless provider Open House Ministries to some under-supported youth mentoring programs that Holtzlander thinks deserve a lot more help.

What drove him to downsize his life, sell off his stuff, stop thinking about retirement and start thinking about others? He traces the unusual path he’s on to the homeless man he found sleeping in a car on his sales lot in 2006. Holtzlander didn’t call the police — he offered the man a cup of coffee and, eventually, a job. Then there were more jobs for more needy men who found their way to him. Then he bought a house to put up homeless people, no questions asked.

“I got overwhelmed with all the people coming for help,” he said. “I realized how many people need help.”

He formed a nonprofit corporation called Light of Man and tried to fulfill his vision halfway — by holding fundraisers, running errands, serving the needy while continuing to sell cars and pull down a serious salary. But the fundraisers got old, he said, and some friends got a little tired of his ongoing crusade.

Eventually, Holtzlander, 42, decided on a new approach. He noticed Goodwill stores “going up like crazy” and doing great business recycling one person’s surplus as another person’s staple.

“Money is scarce. What’s not scarce is stuff,” he said. “We’ve had such a good economy for so long, everybody’s got stuff.”

Almost everybody, that is. Holtzlander went looking for a storefront where he could help poor people find the clothes, furniture and other goods they need. He was priced out of downtown. He stumbled across an appropriate venue when he helped his brother do some roofing at the MacArthur Center strip mall. A big retail space there had been vacant ever since the previous tenant, a nonprofit agency called the Lighthouse that hosted recovery meetings for drug and alcohol addicts, closed its doors.

Even then, Holtzlander said, the upfront costs and remodeling expenses would have been prohibitive — except that he was able to offer the landlord his own (and his brother’s) remodeling skills in exchange for a break on rent. Now, about two months into the life of the new Regifting Store, the place is just about squeaking by.

Furniture and tableware, clothes and shoes, books and videos, paintings and electronics all available for a deeply discounted price. In fact, Holtzlander said, he’s liable to let items go for free if the need is really great.

“I cannot believe the needs that walk through that door,” he said. He’s met terminally ill people who have no home, children with parents in jail, ex-convicts who’ve straightened out but whose criminal records prevent them from finding jobs, and just-plain folks who are down on their luck during a very tough economic time.

But he’s also blown away by the spirit of service that’s carrying the project along. There’s literally no staff at the Regifting Store, he said, because everything is done by volunteers, including his daughters, Ashley and Holly. Holtzlander said he doesn’t take a dime out of the operation, and he and his wife are living off her nurse’s salary.

Holtzlander said all store proceeds are funneled to local charities, nonprofits and individuals in need. He’s so interested in alleviating misery, he said, that occasionally his wife, Debbie, has to put her foot down and prevent him from giving away the whole store.

“I guess I don’t have the best business sense,” he said.

The home he bought for the homeless will have to go, he said, because it’s a money pit and not all his tenants have proved trustworthy. Meanwhile, he and Debbie hope to sell the family property in Hockinson even though they love it and move someplace more modest and economical.

Motivating all these changes, he said, is an unquenchable sense of imbalance in society, that some people have an embarrassment of riches while others can barely survive.

“No man should have more than he needs,” he said. “Nobody should have an abundance while his neighbor doesn’t have what he needs.”

But wait isn’t that socialism?

“Socialism, yes, I am 100 percent in favor of socialism,” he said. “I don’t mind you saying that. That’s it.”

But make that a bottom-up style of socialism, he added, driven by individual charity and neighborliness, not by government programs. He said he wishes average folks would assess their real needs and expenses, and make some cuts and donations accordingly.

“What if we just cut out cable bills?” he wondered. “What if everybody in Clark County cut their cable and took that 38 bucks a month and did something positive with it? We wouldn’t need government programs for the poor.”