Developers Charlie Woolley and Greg Glade are teaming up to build 50 affordable apartments at 5100 W. Alameda Ave. in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood.
The apartments will be made available to people earning 40 percent to 50 percent of the area’s median income, or about $22,000 to $35,000 a year. Lease rates will range from $400 to $800 a month.
“This neighborhood is very underserved in terms of quality affordable housing,” said Woolley, president of St. Charles Town Co. “The low-income housing stock here is not that great.”
Woolley also has the liquor store next to the project under contract. If all goes as planned, he expects to develop a day-care center on the site.
The $10.2 million apartment project, on the site of a former used-car lot, received nearly $9 million in low-income housing tax credits from the Colorado Housing Finance Authority, said Tasha Weaver, manager of the tax-credit allocation department.
“The project is in a very strong market where there appears to be very strong demand,” Weaver said.
Red Stone Equity Partners placed the credits with Nationwide Insurance Co., and KeyBank is providing the construction and permanent financing for the project.
The project also received $2.2 million from the Tax Credit Assistance Program, or TCAP, to bridge the financing gap created when low-income housing tax credits decline in value.
The low-income housing tax-credit program was designed to encourage construction and rehabilitation of low-income rental housing by providing a federal income-tax credit as an incentive to investors. But when the economy collapsed, the pool of tax-credit investors shrank by as much as 40 percent, largely because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exited the low-income housing tax-credit market. Other investors also stopped buying the credits, which were selling for about 70 cents on the dollar compared with 98 cents three years ago.
“Now a substantial amount of those (TCAP) dollars have been awarded, and those projects are starting to close and fund and move forward,” said Jaime Gomez, director of CHFA’s commercial lending division. “In a lot of markets throughout the state, there’s still a very strong demand for affordable housing.”
Margaret Jackson: 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, the apartment project at 5100 W. Alameda Ave. was said to be in Lakewood instead of Denver.
