Larry Curtis is president and managing partner of WinnDevelopment, one of the nation’s leading affordable and mixed-income housing developers and owners.
He looks back on his career and shares a development that changed his life.
Name of Development:
The Apartments & Lofts at Boott Mills
Location:
Lowell, Massachusetts
Briefly describe the development:
Listed on the National Historic Register, Boott Mills is the oldest surviving cotton textile mill yard in the United States and an enduring reminder of the city of Lowell’s history as an economic engine in the American Industrial Revolution. The 6.7-acre complex consists of four interconnected buildings built between 1835 and 1882.
WinnCompanies purchased the 225,000 square foot Boott Mills East property in 2003, transforming it into 154 apartments leased at market-rate, workforce and affordable rents. In 2011 the company redeveloped the 180,330-square-foot Boott Mill West property, creating 78 mixed-income condominiums for homeownership and 43,000 square feet of commercial office space. In all, the $60 million historic adaptive-reuse effort took a decade to complete.
Role in the project:
Boott Mills was the first historic mill rehab that I pursued as the leader of WinnDevelopment.
Share why this development is meaningful to you:
In many ways, it served as a template for the next two decades of my career.
It taught me how valuable federal and state historic tax credits can make the math work when pursuing true mixed-income multifamily developments.
It demonstrated how important the transformation of vacant or mostly vacant historic structures can be in fueling community development, especially to the economic rebirth of urban downtowns.
As an architect, it opened my eyes to the design opportunities that present themselves when you build a building within a building.
Importantly, it allowed me to demonstrate to the leaders of other cities and towns that, instead of knocking down these beautiful buildings as had been common practice, they could be preserved, restored and transformed to benefit public policy goals for housing and community development.
Lesson learned from this development:
Keep an open mind because development opportunities can come from unexpected places. Boott Mills was another developer’s failure, but it became one of WinnDevelopment’s most honored successes.
Projects beget projects, so make each one an award winner. Winn had done historic adaptive reuse before, but nothing this ambitious and visible. Thanks to our success at Boott, WinnDevelopment was able to compete for similar projects, not just in Lowell, where we went on to redevelop numerous empty downtown mills into apartment housing, but throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
How has this development changed your life?
The Boott Mills redevelopment launched me and WinnDevelopment on a trajectory that made the company the go-to-developer in historic adaptive reuse. No other residential developer has won more awards for this kind of work.
It’s not all we do by any means, but these are the kind of memorable projects that attract attention and represent a welcome creative departure from the homogeneous, cookie-cutter new construction we see so often today.
It’s safe to say that, without Boott Mills and all the great work that came after it, I would not be a trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation or a lecturer in Real Estate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design today.
