At the corner of Plato Boulevard and South Robert Street, developer Schafer Richardson is four months into construction of Soul, a 178-unit affordable apartment complex quite literally breaking new ground for low-income families south of downtown Saint Paul.
A dozen of the project’s four-bedroom units will be geared toward households earning no more than $35,200.
For affordable housing of that size, “we could hardly find rent comparable because they’re so rare on the market,” said Marsha Goff, who runs Merchants Capital’s Minnesota office, which arranged a complex layer cake of financing for Soul with city, county, and state backing, as well as sizable investment from a labor trust. “Definitely, this project is unique.”
If there’s another key underpinning making roomy affordability possible in Soul, it’s money, and from multiple sources. A long string of funders and financing mechanisms came together to make Soul possible, and some of them trace directly to the vagaries of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The City of Saint Paul dipped into federal American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, funding issued during the early days of the pandemic to earmark $7.85 million toward Soul, or about 10% of the construction and development cost. No tax increment financing was used in the project.
Also supporting the project were federal low-income housing tax credits, issued through the city, as well as low-interest subordinate loans, or “soft” financing, from the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, a community-development financial institution.
“This project is everything we could hope for in an affordable housing project, including units large enough for families,” said Ward 2 city council Member Rebecca Noecker.
Soul is expected to open in the spring of 2024.
Read the full story from the Pioneer Press.
Photo credit: Schafer Richardson
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