Player of the Week: Toni Arnold
March 25, 2015
1 DOWN,1 TO GO!
March 26, 2015
A proposal for senior citizen housing on the site of a former Houma school, while moving ahead, is still not a done deal.
Developers and parish officials who favor the project say they are hopeful a complex series of financing hoops can be jumped, now that the Terrebonne Council on Aging has tentatively agreed to kick $5.5 million toward the deal from their tax-funded coffers.
But TCOA’s cooperation – so far in the form of a promised letter of intent – is still dependent on a favorable opinion from the Louisiana Attorney General, who has been asked whether the action is in accordance with law. And despite a majority vote by the all-volunteer citizen panel that manages the Council to move this far, concerns linger as to whether it is in keeping with the agency’s mission statement. There are also questions about how the project will affect TCOA’s pre-existing plans, which include a senior housing campus in northern Terrebonne as well as a day-care center for seniors being tended to by their working children.
Interviews and examination of records related to the project reveal bitter behind-the-scenes dialogues both in and out of the TCOA, and an unusually candid peek at a most basic government process, the distribution of finite resources to competing interests hungry
for increasingly scant social services.
Parish President Michel Claudet, whose Feb. 19 pitch to the TOCA board was criticized as overly aggressive, stands by his zeal.
“These individuals have a proven track record,” Claudet said of the Renaissance Neighborhood Development Corporation, the New Orleans non-profit that will renovate the old Houma Elementary School and a related structure at Point and Grinage streets, as well as add a third. “It will be a beautiful $20 million development which includes historic tax credits from the renovation that will enhance our downtown and uplift the area as well as provide very needed elderly housing.”
Pressed by a hard deadline for the state tax credits the developers need to make the plan workable, Claudet approached TCOA, seeking money derived largely from a recently-renewed 7.5 mil tax, with no solid promise to the agency of financial return or pay-back.
Thomas Guidroz, a retired Air Force fighter pilot, is among board members with continued reservations about the project.
“It’s a good program for the parish but not with Council On Aging money,” Guidroz said, noting a small percentage of extremely low-income seniors will be approved for the 103-apartment project. “I hope there is some way to get out of this because some of the board is now better educated and don’t want to do this. We got bamboozled.”
The Council on Aging, Guidroz said, can house more of the neediest seniors in the parish with its own planned housing development in Schriever. The developers and a core group of supportive board members, however, say closer examination of relative income studies on seniors should allay those concerns.
DOLLARS AND CENTS
If Claudet’s pitch appeared last-minute and highly pressurized, it is because the project initially was not intended as senior housing, so the Council on Aging was not party to it when Terrebonne Parish first sought proposals from developers in October.
It was only when the developers were unable to secure state grant money derived from a federal program that a $5 million-plus gap in the funding scheme became visible. That’s when a buy-in from the TCOA was sought, with the provison that the project, initially billed as “work-force housing,” would instead be dedicated to seniors.
That’s because senior housing allows more of the tax credits that would make the project palatable for financiers, coupled with other tax-credit incentives already in place.
“In the tax credit application at the state level there are extra points if you are doing elderly housing,” said the parish’s housing and human services director, Darrell Waire. “It gives you a better shot if what you are designing is for the elderly, so Michel (Claudet) had asked RNDC to be sure and look at that. They did a market study to see it if would be feasible. We knew TCOA had some funds that maybe could be used.”
The proposed deal is for RNDC, which is already building lower-income housing on a Bayou Cane site, to obtain $11.5 million from investors, whose reward will be the tax credits.
RNDC is affiliated with the Volunteers of America organization, which has been involved with affordable housing programs nationwide for years.
The New Orleans developer for RNDC, Victor Smeltz, has noted cobbling together complex deals for affordable housing in an atmosphere of shrinking government grants is an area in which his organization and its parent possess great expertise.
According to the proposal advanced by Smeltz, conventional financing from local banks will account for about $2.5 million. The remaining $5.5 million gap would have been plugged up with $5.5 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money issued through the state, possibly left over from other projects.
But RNDC’s Smeltz said money could not be marshaled.
That’s where the request of the TCOA comes in.
The total $19.5 million budget would buy apartments with a mixed-income rent schedule. Five of the apartments would be dedicated to the poorest of the poor and rent for $155-159 per month. Another 57 apartments would be reserved for people whose incomes are 60 percent of the parish’s median income or lower, renting for $565 to $600 per month. A total of 41 apartments would have no income restrictions and would rent for $800 per month.
SHAPE-CHANGING PROPOSAL
The project had its roots in a turnover of the old Houma Elementary School site at Point and Grinage streets to the parish from the Terrebonne Parish School District. The historic main school building and an adjoining structure was, by virtue of an old agreement, to become parish property if the district no longer needed or wanted it.
A Request For Proposals, known in government vernacular as an RFP, was issued Oct. 31, 2014, and newspaper ads were run daily for a week after that, according to records.
“The Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government (TPCG) is offering the historic Houma School building and grounds … for redevelopment into multi-family rental housing targeted to the local workforce,” the RFP states. “TPCG’s objective is to provide attractive, quality housing affordable to households earning less than 80 percent of Area Median Income. The project selected should reflect current sustainability and universal design standards and designed to be comparable and competitive with recently developed market rate apartments. TPCG seeks to maximize the number of units on the site while remaining sensitive to the historic character of the area.”
Despite the required publicizing, only RNDC came forward with a bid.
A Houma developer, Jim Erny, said he would have likely bid on the project had he been aware of it.
The parish made clear in its RFP that no local government money was available for the project, but additional tax credits available through the state for senior housing held a door open for success by the developer.
LAYING ON THE ARM
That the TCOA has what appears to be surplus money is not a secret.
A January audit drew criticism from state officials that the TCOA had too much
Artist’s conception of proposed senior housing on the site of the old Houma Elementary School shows a planned additional building on the site.
An artist’s conception of proposed senior apartments on the old Houma school site, seen from a Point Street view, is an early draft subject to change.
