Washington considering low-income housing project for Downtown | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    At the November Washington City Council meeting the council heard a long presentation by representatives of a company called "Landex" which proposes to renovate the old Hotel Louise and the adjacent old Belk building into apartments for low-income seniors. We have the video of the presentations below. If you choose to watch them all you will also want to download this pdf file of the PowerPoint presentation that was referred to in the video. The second document referred to was apparently some architectural drawings which were unavailable to us at deadline.

    There are five approximately 15-minute video clips. They are simply sequential clips of the presentation. The lady making the presentation is Judy Siegel and the gentleman is Dave Johnston. If you watch all five clips you will know about as much about the project as there is to know right now. For those who want the capsule version here it is:

    The proposal is to renovate the Hotel Louise and Belk buildings into one or two bedroom apartments for elderly, low-income seniors. Mr. Johnston explains that they propose 35 one-bedroom units and 24 two-bedroom units, along with some common area amenities, including a connecting skywalk between the two buildings over Union Alley.

    Perhaps this interpretation is a gross oversimplification but the proposal is to spend $9.7 million on the 59 units and amenities. They propose to raise that money, as seen on slide 21, by selling $6.2 million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits to private investors, another $1.8 million by selling Historic Tax credits and borrowing $287,000 from a private lending institution which would hold the first mortgage on the properties. That leaves $1,426,000 they want the City to pick up, either from city taxpayers or by procuring grants as available.

    The residents would be renters. They would pay rent according to their income, which we understand would be approximately 30% of their income. Applicants would be limited to those making no more than 60% of the median county income which is roughly estimated to be $27-28K. So to quality one would need to have an income of less than about $17,000. It was not clear how the number of residents in the family would factor in. But the essential point is that most of the residents would be low-income comparable to a low income housing project.

    Thus, there are two major issues the city faces. The first is whether they want a low income housing project in the Downtown area and the second is how they would fund the $1.5 million the city would put into the project.

    As usual, there's a deadline looming if the City wants to pursue the project and that comes in January as you will hear in the video.











    To review other business and the background material here.