The developer's plans call for constructing three buildings — a main structure fronting Esplanade Avenue with 40 apartments above two ground-floor retail storefronts, and a pair of smaller, camelback-style houses along Henriette Delille Street will five apartments each. Most of the units will be one-bedrooms. 

The $22.2 million project comes as the city continues to struggle with a shortage of workforce and affordable housing. Housing advocates have said the city needs 55,000 more units of affordable housing than is currently available. 

"The general approach to this one was they wanted a lot of housing, because we have such a housing need in the city," said Josh Collen, president of HRI Communities. "But it's a tight site. It really is a very, very small site, and so we had to stretch to get 50 units onto the property."

Long-term affordability

Thirty-seven apartments will be set aside for affordable housing for renters earning 60% or less of the area median income, which currently restricts it to people earning about $38,800 if they live alone or $43,200 for two-person households.

The terms of the project's financing require those 37 units to stay affordable at that level for at least 45 years, although the fact that the land has been leased from the city means that the public can effectively keep them affordable far longer.

Of those, 15 will be covered by project-based vouchers from the Housing Authority of New Orleans, including a dozen designated as official replacement housing for units that were lost when the city demolished the Iberville public housing development.

Under the terms of a $30.5 million federal program, the Iberville-Treme Choice Neighborhood Initiative, the city was required to build 859 replacement apartments and 1,549 total units in the neighborhoods previously served by the Iberville development — the area between St. Bernard and Tulane avenues and between Broad and Rampart streets.

Fifteen years later, that money has long been spent. But the completion of the Esplanade Delille project — along with two other projects near the Lafitte Greenway that are currently under construction — will bring the total number of units built as part of the initiative to 1,580, and the total number of replacement units to 859, according to Maggie Merrill, senior director of asset management, development and modernization for the Housing Authority of New Orleans.

Finding the financing

Funding for the Esplanade Delille comes from a variety of sources. They include a 9% low-income housing tax credits from the Louisiana Housing Corporation — accounting for about $13.5 million of the construction cost through First Horizon’s Community Investment Group — a $6.5 million loan from the city, a $500,000 loan from the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and a deal with Finance New Orleans to pay a fixed $10,000 a year instead of property taxes. 

"This is a totally replicable model," Collen said, describing it as "best practice" to use quasi-public groups like HANO or NORA to leverage private capital in order to get vacant or blighted city-owned properties back into commerce.

Friday's groundbreaking comes less than a year after the same contractors and development team completed another affordable apartment building about a third of a mile away in the 7th Ward.

“They are very comparable,” Collen said. “Where they really differ is in their building shapes and historical context.”

Read the full article on NOLA.com.