Markeshia Ricks Photo
Tenants outside overflowing Church St. South emergency meeting.
A Boston-based not-for-profit builder is interested in buying the crumbling Church Street South complex with the goal of keeping all 301 subsidized apartments there.
The builder, called Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), expressed its interest in a letter Monday to Peter Standish, a vice-president with Northland Investment Corp., the property’s current owner.
“If you are interested in a preservation solution with respect to Church Street South Apartments — we’d love to talk with you,” POAH Manager of Acquisitions & General Counsel W. Bart Lloyd wrote in the letter.
Lloyd told the Independent Tuesday that he hadn’t yet heard back from Northland. He wrote the letter after learning about the turmoil occurring at the complex across from the train station, where the city has condemned 50 moldy apartments as unsafe for human habitation. While federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has declared Northland in default of its contract for over $3 million in annual Section 8 rental subsidies, more than 50 families have been moved to temporary hotel rooms, a civil rights lawyer is readying a class-action lawsuit, and officials plan to move all 288 existing tenants to permanent new housing within a year.
“We would be interested in buying it and preserving” all 301 Section 8 apartments on site, Lloyd said in an interview.
HUD has approved 301 “project-based” Section 8 certificates for Church Street South. That means under normal circumstances, if tenants leave, they don’t bring the Section 8 subsidy with them. It stays at Church Street South. New tenants can move in with the same subsidy. But not now: When tenants leave the complex over the next year, they will receive either portable Section 8 vouchers instead, or project-based certificates to be used at different locations. The question is what happens next at Church Street South, prime developable land.
POAH would like to preserve and renovate the existing buildings — a prospect local officials and Northland consider hopeless — or else raze them and build a mixed-income development that includes all 301 project-based Section 8 units, according to Lloyd. Otherwise, tenants’ vouchers will eventually expire and the area will lose needed affordable housing, Lloyd argued. He said he has seen that happen in other cities: “A lot of times Section 8 tenants leave and never come back in high-value places.”
POAH undertook a similar project in Chicago with the Grove Parc Apartments, where it rebuilt a troubled complex and included 378 Section 8 apartments out of a total of 504, Lloyd said. He said POAH owns over 8,700 housing units across the country. Its website describes the group’s mission: “to preserve and steward affordable rental housing, to provide stability, hope and economic security to low- and moderate-income individuals and families.” Click here to read about one Boston complex it bought with state help to preserve affordable apartments.
Northland originally bought Church Street South hoping to do something similar: raze it and build an 800-to‑1,000-unit mixed-income and mixed-use development. However, Northland wanted to keep the amount of subsidized apartments at 20 percent; the former DeStefano administration insisted on 30 percent based on the neighborhood’s wishes, which caused a potential deal to fall apart. Meanwhile, conditions at Church Street South deteriorated to the current crisis point for tenants.
Northland Chairman Larry Gottesdiener did not welcome POAH’s unsolicited offer.
“We are only focusing on and will continue only focusing on the relocation of the Church Street South families into safe, quality, permanent housing,” he wrote in an email message to the Independent.
“If they don’t want to sell, no one can make them sell,” Lloyd said. But his group is ready to talk.
Previous coverage of Church Street South:
• Northland Faces Class-Action Lawsuit On Church Street South
• First Attempt To Help Tenants Shuts Down
• Few Details For Left-Behind Tenants
• HUD: Help’s Here. Details To Follow
• Mixed Signals For Church Street South Families
• Church St. South Families Displaced A 2nd Time — For Yale Family Weekend
• Church Street South Getting Cleared Out
• 200 Apartments Identified For Church Street South Families
• Northland Asks Housing Authority For Help
• Welcome Home
• Shoddy Repairs Raise Alarm — & Northland Offer
• Northland Gets Default Order — & A New Offer
• HUD, Pike Step In
• Northland Ordered To Fix Another 17 Roofs
• Church Street South Evacuees Crammed In Hotel
• Church Street South Endgame: Raze, Rebuild
• Harp Blasts Northland, HUD
• Flooding Plagues Once-Condemned Apartment
• Church Street South Hit With 30 New Orders
• Complaints Mount Against Church Street South
• City Cracks Down On Church Street South, Again
• Complex Flunks Fed Inspection, Rakes In Fed $$
• Welcome Home — To Frozen Pipes
• City Spotted Deadly Dangers; Feds Gave OK
• No One Called 911 | “Hero” Didn’t Hesitate
• “New” Church Street South Goes Nowhere Fast
• Church Street South Tenants Organize