A 152-unit senior housing development has been rehabilitated and preserved as affordable housing for the long term in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Brookpark Place was built in 1975 under the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 236 program. However, when the financing matured in 2017, the affordability restrictions expired on all the units except for 30 homes that were covered under the project-based Section 8 program.
The other units no longer had restrictions even though many low-income individuals continued to live at Brookpark Place, says David McCarthy, president of Heritage Housing. He founded the firm in 2017, leveraging about 14 years of industry experience, including working as a senior project manager at Jonathan Rose Cos., a prominent national affordable housing company.
In recent years, McCarthy’s Connecticut-based firm has completed a number of projects, including serving as a consultant for other organizations, but Brookpark Place is the first that Heritage Housing has done on its own.
The company acquired the property in November 2018 with plans to rehab the aging development and restore its affordability. “We worked with the West Virginia Housing Development Fund (WVHDF) to develop a plan to preserve as much of the housing as we could for affordable housing,” McCarthy says.
WVHDF issued tax-exempt bonds and 4% low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs), with financing from PNC Bank. This allowed Heritage Housing to create another 70 LIHTC-financed homes that will be affordable for 30 years to go along with the 30 project-based Section 8 units. The remaining 52 units are market rate, but none of the existing tenants were displaced, McCarthy says.
The number of affordable units was determined by the income level of the existing tenants to allow all the seniors to stay, he explains.
The $14.5 million project also received acquisition and Section 221(d)(4) financing from Capital One.
In addition to preserving the affordability at Brookpark Place, the team recently completed a significant rehab of the apartments, including new kitchens and bathrooms, as well as modernizing the original elevator and replacing windows, doors, and plumbing lines.
Construction was under way when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. After an initial interruption, the team was able to get back to work and keep everyone safe, according to McCarthy.
The property manager is Crossgates Management.
More is coming from Heritage Housing, which has closed on a second acquisition-rehab project in the state with WVHDF and PNC.
The firm also has worked on affordable housing developments in Connecticut, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
