Many Americans vaguely know the city of Lahore, Pakistan, as the site of recent terrorist attacks. To Esther Schlorholtz, those headlines have a much bigger impact – for her, Lahore used to be home. The child of missionaries, she grew up in the bustling, ancient city, before crisscrossing Eurasia and doing a two-year stint in India, among other things. Her youthful experiences sparked an interest in community development, and now she oversees community investment for Boston Private Bank.

Esther Schlorholtz

Title: Senior Vice President,

Director of Community Investment

Company: Boston Private Bank & Trust Co.

Experience: 14 Years

Age: 54

What was it was it like to grow up in Lahore at that time?

Lahore is a magnificent old city, huge, millions of people live there, and so I was fortunate in being able to grow up in a cultural center of Pakistan.… We lived there almost my entire childhood, and so my first year of school was in a Pakistani kindergarten, where I was the only non-Pakistani, … and after that I went to a boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas … So I got to live in a wonderful place, and made lots of friends, and through that, obviously, I learned Urdu, although I have to admit I’m quite rusty at it.

And growing up there shaped the career path you eventually chose?

You couldn’t live in Pakistan without learning about inequities. Everywhere you go there is a very serious contrast between those that have and those that have not.… When I was in high school I volunteered to work in a clinic in the old city of Lahore, [and the doctor who ran the clinic] assigned me to hand out the food and soap to the women and children. … I would notice the women coming back for seconds and thirds, and I remember getting very angry because they were cheating the system.… I started realizing that it was not that they were cheating the system; it’s that they were being driven to cheat the system. They had nothing, and they were trying to protect their children. And it was an important moment for me, to be able to see that.

You also traveled a great deal through much of Asia in the mid-1970s – I’ve heard that a lot of hippie-types were roaming around the subcontinent at that point.

People were traveling all over; it was an incredible time to learn about different cultures. Mind you, the people who were the hippies, they did not interact well with the culture. There was a lot of drugs, and there were a lot of people who just were not there to see the countries or to meet the people or learn about the culture – they were basically just traveling through.

When did you settle in Boston?

I started working at the city of Boston [in 1983]…. I started the last few months of [Mayor] Kevin White’s administration and stayed through [Mayor] Ray Flynn’s administration, and it was a time of real investment in communities that had had a lot of disinvestment prior to that. … The focus was on affordable housing, economic development, job creation, youth programs.

I understand the city of Boston was a rougher place in the 1980s.

It was very rough in the city. You would not now recognize what it had been because it was vast swaths of vacant land, there had been arson for profit. …I became involved with the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative … and that was a community that had been really severely damaged by fires, by people just trashing properties. Contractors from the suburbs would come and dump their trash there and their old oil cans and whatever, and even piles of old meat that were rotting – it was an amazingly awful thing that they did.

What type of work have you done at Boston Private?

Since I got to Boston Private [in 1995], we have financed 20 or 30 vacant acres into housing and other purposes, but primarily housing. … We’re right in the middle of one right now…. But it was one of the last new constructions of affordable homeownership developments that the city of Boston and the state did together before we ended up with this current downturn … it is now at the stage where we’re looking for purchasers. That will be very interesting – a lot of people are not buying right now.

When I hear about all the failures of the financing of those low- and moderate-income buyers, it makes me so upset because our loans perform extremely well. These borrowers perform really, really well … responsible lenders like ourselves finance these borrowers with loans that are suitable for them – that’s it. It’s not a big deal. … when people tell me that you can’t do this lending well, and that it isn’t good business and it isn’t good for the community, I get very disturbed by that because obviously you can do it well if you are trying to do it as a responsible lender.

Five Things Schlorholtz has experienced (that most of us haven’t):

1.) Was accused of being a CIA agent while living in India. Nobody really took her accuser seriously, she said, but it still made things “awkward.”

2.) Learned to play sitar; she studied in school, but has long since shelved the instrument.

3.) Gone to visit her mom and dad – in Nepal. They moved here after leaving Pakistan.

4.) Ridden on the Orient Express through Asia in the mid-1970s.

5.) Witnessed a drug bust on a Western traveler while awaiting passage at the Pakistani border.