Case Studies Archives

Low interest rates are enabling refinancing on multifamily projects that can free up money for developers to use on additional affordable and workforce housing production.

Teachers will be returning to Washington, DC’s Malcolm X Elementary School, which closed in 2013. The city is renovating the old school to put in place a permanent home for an “early college” high school. But now they will also have the chance to live adjacent to the new school in a new development, as part of a District initiative to boost housing for educators.

Extensive consultation with the residents of Washington, DC’s Ward 7 gave city officials and developers a clear sense of how local folk would like to see a vacant old school in the Marshall Heights section redeveloped. The residents wanted housing. Lots of it, rentals and homeownership units, housing for seniors, affordable, workforce, market rate. They wanted commercial properties, retail. Perhaps most of all, they wanted a grocery store for a neighborhood that currently doesn’t have one.

Residents at Foothill Villas Apartments in San Bernardino, CA stand to save more than $1,000 apiece in electricity costs after a solar photovoltaic system is installed as part of an extensive acquisition and rehab made possible by Low Income Housing Tax Credits.

From the evidence of the Boston area, one good way to get a transit-oriented development (TOD) done is to site a housing project either directly adjacent to a transit line or on unused transit property itself. This month Tax Credit Advisor is featuring the third in a series of these Boston TODs, an ambitious development called Bartlett Station, going up on an old bus yard in the city’s Roxbury section.

An abandoned hospital campus is set to bring new life to a suburban Chicago neighborhood through an ambitious rehab that is to build housing, health care, social services and educational office space through financing using both Historic Tax Credits (HTC) and New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) equity.

Affordable housing developments are never easy. But acquiring and rehabbing a 23-year-old project in Houston gave Vesta Corporation a few more hoops to jump through than just fixing old roofs and redoing faulty water lines. In addition to the nuts and bolts of this comprehensive $30 million renovation, the developer found the state housing agency wanted to see some non-construction improvements as well, like better educational opportunities for residents and a reduction of crime and blight in the neighborhood.

A.O. Flats, a Greater Boston housing development that takes its name from two local landmarks (A for Arborway from the Arnold Arboretum and O for Orange from the Orange transit line), itself will be a blend of two types of residences. Both affordable and workforce housing residents are putting down roots in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain just a short commuter ride from center city.

Not many buildings have their own rail system, much less one that runs across the ceiling. And very few have conference rooms where you can look out and see elephants and giraffes from the windows. But Zoo Atlanta’s Savanna Hall has both.

Income averaging has achieved tax credit eligibility for all 135 units, including workforce housing units at up to 80 percent of area median income (AMI), at a development set to rise from a Boston trolley parking lot.

Wexford Science + Technology has taken an old power plant formerly called the Dynamo House and developed a historic rehab that is turning into a dynamo of its own, one that is transforming a whole section of Providence, RI into a knowledge and medical hub.

The historic rehab of the YWCA Central Massachusetts will not only improve its traditionally extensive array of services for women and their children, but it is being built by a woman-led construction management team as well.