Charity a real estate powerhouse

By day, Henry Graciani oversees a 54-bed treatment centre for alcoholics and drug addicts who come to him broke and hopeless. After work, he makes a quick drive to the $US1.3 million ($NZ1.8 million) Santa Monica, California, home he shares with his wife and three children.

Mr Graciani is not a highly paid executive returning to a beach retreat. He and his wife, Dina, are career Salvation Army officers who bring home $US25,000 a year, combined. They are among the charity's officers who are paid modest salaries but given rent-free housing, some in high-priced communities such as Southern California.

The Salvation Army is one of the largest charities in the United States. It serves more than 69 million meals a year to the needy, houses thousands of the nation's homeless and provides ready response to worldwide disasters, most recently in Haiti. It is also a real estate powerhouse.

In Los Angeles and Orange counties alone, the charity owns 87 homes and condominiums worth about $US52 million. Nationwide, it valued its real estate holdings, including commercial real estate, at about $4 billion in 2008 - one-third of its total assets.

For more than a century, the Salvation Army has provided a vast social-service safety net throughout the world, offering food for the homeless, shelter for the abused and relief for disaster victims. Founded in 1865 in London, the Salvation Army has an unusual, quasi-military structure and a highly religious mission.

It is led by officers who dress in uniform and carry ranks ranging from cadet - an officer in training - to a single general: Shaw Clifton, the group's London-based worldwide leader. Officers are allowed to marry, so long as their spouses agree to become officers as well. The Salvation Army has been boycotted by gay rights groups because it considers homosexuality to be immoral.

Aspiring officers are trained at four Salvation Army colleges in the United States, including one in Rancho Palos Verdes. Officers practise Christianity by running programmes to aid the needy. They are paid small salaries and provided houses that the Salvation Army owns across the country.

Salvation Army officials say the real estate programme makes sound business sense because it enables them to pay low salaries and transfer officers throughout the country without the burden and delay that typically accompany executive moves.

It's a policy similar to that of churches that provide housing to their ministers, said Victor A. Leslie, a lieutenant-colonel who oversees the Army's Southern California operations.

Mr Graciani's two-storey home is made of terracotta stucco and has a Spanish-tile roof and an enormous backyard with a trampoline for his children.

"The house is a nice benefit. It's not why I do what I do," Mr Graciani said during an interview in his home's second-floor master bedroom, a ceiling fan whirling overhead.

"I do what I do because of my commitment to God to serve people through the Salvation Army."