The Official Charlotte, NC Discussion Thread

[Responsible Allen Iverson]

Outside investors are buying up Charlotte’s affordable apartments


Outside investors are buying up Charlotte’s affordable apartments

By Katie Peralta | November 29, 2020

It is increasingly difficult to find apartments for rent in Charlotte for less than $1,000.
The few that exist are usually in older apartment complexes, built between the 1940s and 1990s. They don’t have the amenities typical of new luxury developments in popular areas like South End and Uptown. These modest, cheaper apartments are called “naturally occurring affordable housing,” or NOAH. Households in NOAHs pay no more than 30 percent of their income on housing expenses, without financial assistance.

All over Charlotte, these NOAH units are disappearing. Most are being snatched up by outside investors, fixed up with a few new countertops and cabinets, then turned around for higher rents. Out-of-town investors own nearly 70 percent of apartments built before 1990 in Charlotte.

Now some local investors have developed a fund to try to keep them locally owned and affordable, to help make some dent in the housing crisis here.

Zoom out: From 2010 to 2018, Charlotte’s stock of low-cost rental housing, or apartments that cost $800 a month or less, fell from about 51 percent of the total rental housing stock to only 25 percent, according to the 2020 State of Housing Instability and Homelessness Report from UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute.

A partial cause of this 26 percent drop, according to the report: The loss of NOAH units.
“As a community, we’ve spent the majority of our resources for affordable housing on new construction,” said Mark Ethridge, a partner at Ascent Real Estate Capital who works on NOAH preservation.

“That would be fine if we weren’t losing our NOAHs. But we’re not building enough. We have to have both.”

Investor interest: For the same reason that new apartment developers are flocking to Charlotte, investors, many of whom are from out of town, are buying up NOAHs. Through what’s known as a “value add” deal, they invest in the properties through renovations. Then, to get a return on their investment, they raise the rent. This often prices out existing tenants.

Of the roughly 36,000 apartment units in Charlotte built in 1990 or before, between 20,000 and 25,000 are owned by out-of-town investors, according to local NOAH experts.
For instance, Cortland Partners of Atlanta bought Cortland University North near UNC Charlotte in 2015. As the Observer reported in a 2018 story, Cortland did extensive renovations, including adding granite countertops and a new clubhouse. The developer raised rents from an average of $764 to $1,017. Today, rents there average about $1,082.

One complex’s story: At the Central Pointe Apartments in east Charlotte, a sign out front advertises, ‘NEWLY RENOVATED APARTMENTS.’

The tidy, unpretentious two-story brown apartments span several buildings. Built in 1972, the complex has a number of fresh amenities, including a playground, dog park, fitness center, and saltwater pool. Two-bedrooms range from about $1,100-$1,270.

That’s cheaper than many newer luxury apartments around town. Just up Central, for instance, the Midwood Station development has two-bedrooms between $1,645 and $2,100. Additionally, Central Pointe boasts “green initiatives” that they say save residents up to $500 per year.

Still, Central Pointe is in an area on Central near Sharon Amity where the median household income is just over $39,000, according to census data.

It’s one of many former NOAHs on Central Avenue that developers have overhauled in recent years. According to property records, an LLC associated with Charlotte-based Ginkgo Residential bought Central Pointe in 2013 for $8.57 million.

Given its location, Central Pointe likely won’t be the last of the NOAHs on Central that developers scoop up and remodel.

Around the corner from the complex is the old Eastland Mall site. There, Crosland Southeast plans for a redevelopment of the formerly vacant property that’ll add offices, retail, residential, and green space.

It’s unclear how much Ginkgo has increased rents over the years. A company representative did not respond to a request for comment.

Central Pointe Apartments at 4933 Central Avenue

In what was heralded as a “huge win” for affordable housing a few months ago, Roof Above announced the purchase of a 341-unit NOAH complex in east Charlotte. The local nonprofit plans to set aside 75 apartments for those who are experiencing long-term homelessness.
Roof Above paid $47.7 million for the 23-acre property, nearly three times the purchase price the seller paid only three years ago, property records show.

Additionally, in the last property revaluation, the county assessed the value of the site to be $24,149,400.

On the surface, it would appear that Roof Above overpaid for the property. The previous owner did make extensive upgrades to it, though. And the reality is, purchasing NOAHs is extremely competitive, said Ethridge, who helped execute the sale for Roof Above.

The point of acquiring the HillRock property was to find something with years of life left, Ethridge said. Something that didn’t require millions more in upgrades. Through deed restrictions, Roof Above plans to keep HillRock apartments affordable for at least 27 years for low-income households.

“In an environment where rents are rising, interest rates are at all-time lows, and construction costs are increasing, the value of NOAHs are going to rise. All three are happening now at a precipitous rate,” Ethridge said.

[Related Agenda story: In a ‘huge win’ for affordable housing, Roof Above buys a 341-unit apartment complex off Eastway Drive]

HillRock Estates (courtesy of Roof Above)

There are a few other groups that’ve also worked to preserve older, affordable apartments around Charlotte.

• In 2019, affordable-housing developer Vitus and the Affordable Housing Institute purchased Heritage Park Apartments, CBJ wrote. The joint venture said it would renovate the property while keeping units affordable.
• The city last year approved plans to spend $2.1 million to renovate the Sharon Oaks apartments in east Charlotte. The complex dates back to the early 1960s and has two-bedroom units for under $900, the Observer reported. Laurel Street Residential, a developer focused on affordable housing, and Ascent Real Estate Capital, bought the complex in spring 2019 and have said they plan to keep the units affordable.
• Also last year, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing Partnership (CMHP) bought the 91-unit Wendover Walk apartment complex. The local nonprofit made capital improvements and has capped rents at between $785-$1,010.

CMHP is bidding to buy two other NOAH complexes in Charlotte, according to Julie Porter, the organization’s president. Purchasing NOAHs is very difficult with so much outside investor interest, though.

In 2018, CMHP tried to acquire the 348-unit, 1970s-era Arcadian Village complex, but a company affiliated with Miami-based Monument Real Estate Services outbid them. Last summer, CMHP tried to buy the Lake Arbor apartments, built in 1974, but a New York real estate company, URS Capital, outbid them by about $2 million. The new owners ordered all tenants to move out while renovations are underway.

“It is very difficult without significant promised resources to purchase any type of NOAH complex,” Porter said. “We’re having to overbid in order to acquire these properties.”

Given the demand from local population growth, Charlotte has a shortage of about 34,000 affordable housing units, the city has said.
The need is greatest for households who make 30 percent or less of the area’s median income (AMI), or about $25,050 for a family of four.

“The more severe the difference between supply and demand, the more opportunity there is for people to raise rent,” Ethridge said of developers that flip NOAHs. “It’s a recipe for a lot of investment by a lot of private equity.”

Ethridge sees NOAH preservation as a key part in addressing affordable housing.

That’s why last month, Ascent Housing worked with Erskine Bowles and Nelson Schwab to launch a $58 million fund to purchase about 1,500 NOAH units around Charlotte. It’s called the Housing Impact Fund.

Here’s a bit more about the fund:

• The goal is to buy existing apartments and place deed restrictions on them to keep them affordable.
• The fund comprises investments from local corporations and individuals, including Schwab, Bowles, Truist, LendingTree, Atrium, and Movement Mortgage.
• Truist will serve as the fund’s lead investor, committing $15 million.
• The fund plans to acquire communities in “opportunity-rich neighborhoods” within a few miles of Uptown.

What’s next? Through the new fund, Ascent is acquiring the 144-unit Lake Mist apartment complex in southwest Charlotte near Archdale Drive and South Boulevard. The deal closes this week. Ascent will make significant upgrades to the property, including replacing roofs and siding, and repairing the parking lot.

But it will remain affordable for low-income residents. The majority of units will be for people who make 60 percent or less AMI.

For this development, the city and county recently approved a NOAH rental subsidy pilot program. A third-party administrator will identify tenants most in need of financial assistance and administer subsidies on behalf of the city/county.

“We’re not in the business of trying to create luxury units in these older properties to get the most rent,” Ethridge says.

“We’re getting units that are clean, safe, warm, and dry and trying to keep them as affordable as we can.”

 

[Responsible Allen Iverson]

Myers Park cheered on a Black Lives Matter protest in June, then voted for Trump in November


Myers Park cheered on a Black Lives Matter protest in June, then voted for Trump in November

By Michael Graff | November 30, 2020

At 9 a.m. on the Friday after the election, church bells rang out all around Myers Park, as usual, and the Reverend Benjamin Boswell was outside talking about racial justice, as usual.
“You can put a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard and still be racist,” Boswell, the pastor at Myers Park Baptist, said to me.
It’d been five months since Boswell joined more than a thousand people in what many believe to be the first racial justice protest to come through Myers Park, the most prestigious neighborhood in Charlotte, and maybe the most prestigious in North Carolina.

It’d also been three days since that same neighborhood was one of the few in Charlotte to turn out for Donald Trump.

“They’re just protecting their interests,” Boswell said that quiet Friday morning. “Their money and their power.”

The protest was held on June 1, one week after George Floyd died under the knee of a police officer in Minnesota, and the protests had gone mainstream to the point of arriving on Queens Road West, the willow-oak lined boulevard that one local writer once called Charlotte’s “Champs-Élysées.”

In the lawns that led to the front doors of mansions, many people along the route chanted, handed out water bottles, and held up supportive signs.

“I love you! Spread the word!” one Black protester shouted to the people in the lawns.

For some, like Boswell, the walk was just the latest step in a long process.

The protests after the 2016 police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott caused several churches and nonprofit organizations and government agencies to reckon with inequality in Charlotte. They caused the city to grip the fact that for all the wealth along the march’s route — Queens Road to Selwyn Avenue to Wellesley — there was an equal and opposite reality along strips like Beatties Ford and West Boulevard in west Charlotte.

For four years, organizations of all stripes held talk-about-it sessions and bridge-the-gap dinners. They raised thousands — millions in some cases — to help with affordable housing and other initiatives. Boswell even started an anti-racism training program titled, “What Does It Mean to Be White?”

Now it was 2020, a presidential election year, and underlining the June protest was a not-so-subtle message: If you were marching that day, if you were chanting Black Lives Matter, you were voting against Trump. The president clarified that distinction as summer wore on, attacking the phrase as a “terrible name,” and saying the organization is “bad for Black people. It’s bad for everybody.”

As autumn settled in, “Black Lives Matter” and “We Believe” signs popped up in yards throughout Myers Park. Many were soon accompanied by “Biden-Harris” displays. You’d have had to search pretty hard to find an open Trump-Pence supporter.

Then came Election Day.

Around Myers Park and Eastover, Trump’s totals actually looked better than his 2016 numbers.

Mecklenburg County still hasn’t assigned all mail-in tallies to each precinct. But as it stands now, precinct 8, whose map traces the protest route, would be one of the few Mecklenburg precincts to go from blue in 2016 to red in 2020.

Trump has 51 percent of the vote in precinct 8, according to current numbers, up from 43 percent in the same precinct in 2016. Even more striking is the difference between 2020 and the 2018 midterms — in which Democratic congressional candidate Dan McCready achieved 59 percent of the vote.

The numbers raised eyebrows among people who took part in the march, as well as its organizers.
And they created questions about just how much the protests resonated in this neighborhood where the median income is more than $130,000, and 87 percent of the residents are white.

“I think about my friends whose houses we walked past, and in the back of my head I think, ‘They still voted for Trump,'” says Marcy McClanahan, a white Myers Park resident and chairperson of the board of deacons of Myers Park Baptist. She voted for Biden. “It’s a very difficult thing to reconcile.”

McClanahan’s surprise highlights a low-key tension here, one of people caught wondering about the distance between what’s said and unsaid, and how the neighborhood presents and how it votes.

A Financial Times analysis said that among those families whose incomes were more than $100,000, support for the president rose from 45 percent in 2016 to 51 percent in 2020.

“You’ve got a lot of closet conservatives,” former Republican city council member Edwin Peacock III tells me. “I cannot think of a single Trump sign that I saw between SouthPark and Eastover.”

Former mayor and governor Pat McCrory, who has lived in Myers Park for 30 years, takes Peacock’s words further.

“You didn’t see Republican signs, or Trump signs, for fear of backlash from PC police. It’s just not worth it, which is a sad commentary,” says McCrory, a Republican.
“It’s at many people’s work, places of worship, and in your neighborhood. You keep your heads down and sometimes sadly it’s best not to converse in political discussion. And hope that those on the left don’t engage you in verbal assaults.”

The leaders of this summer’s protests say the challenge is deeper than appearances and what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

“It’s more than a photo op,” says Kass Ottley, who was on the bullhorn for the protest and led the crowd from one chant to the next. “It’s people’s lives.”

Myers Park Baptist has long been a progressive church in a conservative neighborhood.

The Sunday after the 2016 election, the Reverend William Barber walked up the curved staircase to the pulpit at Myers Park Baptist while the congregation sang the old civil rights hymn, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On).”
The former president of the state NAACP and the founder of the modern Poor People’s Campaign, Barber has been described by some as “the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst.” His Moral Mondays effort was a weekly protest against the North Carolina legislature — and the McCrory administration — for advancing voter ID laws and for not expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

That Sunday in 2016, five days after Trump’s election, Barber’s setting was the progressive Myers Park Baptist. In 2007, the North Carolina Baptist Convention booted the church because it allowed gay and lesbian members.

But even there, people weren’t prepared for what Barber would say. He was scheduled to speak for a few minutes but talked for 90.

The Keith Scott protests had been just two months earlier, but they never made their way down Queens Road. In some respects, Barber’s address was the first major protest in Myers Park — a neighborhood that was laid out as a streetcar suburb in the early 1900s, when the deeds included restrictions that said: “This lot shall be owned and occupied by people of the Caucasian race only.”

“We have to have a grown-up conversation about race in this country,” Barber told them. “And we’re gonna have to have it in audiences like this. And my white brothers and sisters, you’re going to have to help lead it and deal with it.”

Toward the end of the sermon, Barber called Boswell, a white man who was just 36 years old then. Barber said he wanted to “anoint” Boswell. He put two fingers on the local pastor’s forehead and said, “Even after rejection, we must be resilient, we must be revived, we must be forces of redemption, and we cannot give in to easy reconciliation.”

Boswell took the words to heart, and almost immediately started conjuring ways to have conversations about race among his congregation.

But the very next night, Boswell found himself in a very different setting — one with the deacons of his church. They were looking at him, their young pastor, and they wanted answers.

“People stood up and said it was horrible,” he told me of the deacons’ reaction to Barber’s address. “They said it was a political message.”

The conversation didn’t stop there, though. In fact, Boswell said, it opened up a dialogue that continues today.

His seven-week course, which is supported by grant money through Davidson College, usually has about 10 participants. Many are couples ranging from elderly to young. At the outset, each student writes his or her own racial autobiography.

“They almost all write about the first time they met a Black person,” he says. Then they read James Baldwin. Then the conversations shift the burden of race to them. By the end of the course, they write those autobiographies again, and they take far different forms.

For Boswell, the relationship between Trump and white supremacy is clear. And it goes beyond the president’s “both sides” comments after Charlottesville, or words on far-right organizations such as the Proud Boys. In his course and in his messages from the pulpit, Boswell drills far deeper into race than that.

The class isn’t for open racists; it’s actually targeted at white progressives who believe they aren’t racist. The same people that Baldwin was talking about in 1962 when he wrote, “Whatever white people do not know about the Negro reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

Kass Ottley organized and led the June 1 protest.

Here’s what most people didn’t see in that June 1 protest: Kass Ottley, the organizer, says her phone and email exploded that day with concerned residents.
“I got a lot of pushback — from people telling me we couldn’t park there. Or, you can’t have it at the park,” she tells me recently. “Just trying to tell me where I can and can’t be.”

Ottley is a longtime activist, now in her 50s, who worked with the city to produce a Safe Communities report that outlined ways to reimagine policing. She was recently named one of Charlotte magazine’s 2020 Charlotteans of the Year.

I followed her throughout that march and others. She’s purposeful, thoughtful, a New York native who ratcheted up her Charlotte activism after the a CMPD officer shot and killed unarmed Jonathan Ferrell 10 times in September 2013.

“People fall back into pressure. They want to do the right thing. They know about the oppression and the systemic racism, and they don’t want to be associated with that, but they don’t want to be outcast in their own communities,” Ottley says.

“It’s easy to say Black Lives Matter when you’re in a crowd of Black and brown people,” she continues. “But I need you to take that message to your homes and your offices and your friends, and I need you to speak up when your racist auntie says something about Black people.”

Ottley’s dissection of the election didn’t stop with Myers Park’s precincts, though. She looked at the numbers of Black men who voted for Trump, and Latinos who voted for Trump, and how those increased across the country over 2016.

Republicans say that’s too often overlooked. They say that regardless of labels and chants and marches, they believe their policies can help bridge inequities. And they wonder if the bump in support from voters of color this year will continue.

“I agree there’s systemic racism in this country,” local GOP campaign strategist Larry Shaheen says. “But I don’t think the Democratic approach to it is the best way to approach it.”

Protesters move through Myers Park on June 1, and several folks from the neighborhood stood in their yards to offer support.

 

[Responsible Allen Iverson]

Myers Park is, like most places, more complicated than simple descriptions.
The high school here is one of the largest in the state, with nearly 3,000 students. It pulls from Myers Park and from Grier Heights, a historically Black neighborhood. And it pulls from some subsidized housing communities that have been mixed in. In 2015, I spent the fall working on a series about the Myers Park High football team, as its coaching staff tried to bring kids from different backgrounds together.

The series focused on several players, none more prominent than Jamal Watson. He was the star cornerback of that team, a young man who grew up with a single mother he adored and a little sister he protected in an apartment in south Charlotte.

After the series ran, Jamal and I participated in a discussion with the congregation at Myers Park Methodist. That discussion actually took place several months before the Keith Scott protests broke out.

The next time I saw Jamal was this past May, on Beatties Ford Road, at the first George Floyd protest near the police station there. Now a senior in college, Jamal stood on the outskirts of the protest, saying he was there just to observe. He’s a sociology major, he told me, and just interested.

Point is, Myers Park is a place that can nurture a young Black man like Jamal, and it’s a place where a young white reverend can launch a program on whiteness, and it’s a place where a former Republican governor can live for 30 years and still sometimes feel uncomfortable, and a place that went right when the rest of Charlotte went left.

And it’s a place for someone like Marcy McClanahan, the white woman and chairperson of the deacons at Myers Park Baptist.

McClanahan participated in a protest in June, then went through anti-racism training for seven weeks in the fall. She’s taken the mission of the training and tried to apply it with the friends from the neighborhood she believes voted for Trump. But few want to say they did, she says.

“It’s almost as if what we saw that day (of the protest) was a neighborhood coming out to — I don’t want to be too harsh on people — but coming out as allies for the moment, but not allies in reality,” McClanahan said. “If you’re too embarrassed to talk about who you voted for, should you have voted for them?”

 

[Ethnic Vagina Finder]

 

[The M.I.C.]

Might as well get ready y’all..
@CarmelBarbie @Bryan Danielson @Tribal Outkast

 

[The M.I.C.]

This is going to get ugly.

 

[Tribal Outkast]

I really hate this man smh. Some company bought a hotel that’s supposed to help homeless people here. I really hope it helps man.

 

[Bryan Danielson]

Might as well get ready y’all..
@CarmelBarbie @Bryan Danielson @Tribal Outkast

shyt I am ready...... I stay in I ain’t like these crazy folks risking it...... plus other than essentials been Trynna stack bread as best I can

 

[Bryan Danielson]

y’all seen this community here?

 

[Tribal Outkast]

y’all seen this community here?

I’ve passed by these plenty times but never cared to look into them. The inside looks way better than I expected, but I don’t see myself paying that much for one.

 

[Bryan Danielson]

I’ve passed by these plenty times but never cared to look into them. The inside looks way better than I expected, but I don’t see myself paying that much for one.

Yea...... I think the value is lost to me when I see it’s a 3bd, 2.5bth and one car garage.

Plus I’m not really a fan of the “open space common area like that.

Im looking at buying a new house in the next few years and and I need atleast 4bd, preferably 3bth, 2 car garage and I need an office.

 

[Bryan Danielson]

My dream place to live is in the Wellington Community area over there in the 28269 area still close to Harris and Concord.

I just LOVE they houses over there and it’s park plus it has like a recreation center with a pool and etc.

Second choice is anywhere in Highland Creek

 

[Peter Parker]

Outside investors are buying up Charlotte’s affordable apartments


Outside investors are buying up Charlotte’s affordable apartments

By Katie Peralta | November 29, 2020

It is increasingly difficult to find apartments for rent in Charlotte for less than $1,000.
The few that exist are usually in older apartment complexes, built between the 1940s and 1990s. They don’t have the amenities typical of new luxury developments in popular areas like South End and Uptown. These modest, cheaper apartments are called “naturally occurring affordable housing,” or NOAH. Households in NOAHs pay no more than 30 percent of their income on housing expenses, without financial assistance.

All over Charlotte, these NOAH units are disappearing. Most are being snatched up by outside investors, fixed up with a few new countertops and cabinets, then turned around for higher rents. Out-of-town investors own nearly 70 percent of apartments built before 1990 in Charlotte.

Now some local investors have developed a fund to try to keep them locally owned and affordable, to help make some dent in the housing crisis here.

Zoom out: From 2010 to 2018, Charlotte’s stock of low-cost rental housing, or apartments that cost $800 a month or less, fell from about 51 percent of the total rental housing stock to only 25 percent, according to the 2020 State of Housing Instability and Homelessness Report from UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute.

A partial cause of this 26 percent drop, according to the report: The loss of NOAH units.
“As a community, we’ve spent the majority of our resources for affordable housing on new construction,” said Mark Ethridge, a partner at Ascent Real Estate Capital who works on NOAH preservation.

“That would be fine if we weren’t losing our NOAHs. But we’re not building enough. We have to have both.”

Investor interest: For the same reason that new apartment developers are flocking to Charlotte, investors, many of whom are from out of town, are buying up NOAHs. Through what’s known as a “value add” deal, they invest in the properties through renovations. Then, to get a return on their investment, they raise the rent. This often prices out existing tenants.

Of the roughly 36,000 apartment units in Charlotte built in 1990 or before, between 20,000 and 25,000 are owned by out-of-town investors, according to local NOAH experts.
For instance, Cortland Partners of Atlanta bought Cortland University North near UNC Charlotte in 2015. As the Observer reported in a 2018 story, Cortland did extensive renovations, including adding granite countertops and a new clubhouse. The developer raised rents from an average of $764 to $1,017. Today, rents there average about $1,082.

One complex’s story: At the Central Pointe Apartments in east Charlotte, a sign out front advertises, ‘NEWLY RENOVATED APARTMENTS.’

The tidy, unpretentious two-story brown apartments span several buildings. Built in 1972, the complex has a number of fresh amenities, including a playground, dog park, fitness center, and saltwater pool. Two-bedrooms range from about $1,100-$1,270.

That’s cheaper than many newer luxury apartments around town. Just up Central, for instance, the Midwood Station development has two-bedrooms between $1,645 and $2,100. Additionally, Central Pointe boasts “green initiatives” that they say save residents up to $500 per year.

Still, Central Pointe is in an area on Central near Sharon Amity where the median household income is just over $39,000, according to census data.

It’s one of many former NOAHs on Central Avenue that developers have overhauled in recent years. According to property records, an LLC associated with Charlotte-based Ginkgo Residential bought Central Pointe in 2013 for $8.57 million.

Given its location, Central Pointe likely won’t be the last of the NOAHs on Central that developers scoop up and remodel.

Around the corner from the complex is the old Eastland Mall site. There, Crosland Southeast plans for a redevelopment of the formerly vacant property that’ll add offices, retail, residential, and green space.

It’s unclear how much Ginkgo has increased rents over the years. A company representative did not respond to a request for comment.

Central Pointe Apartments at 4933 Central Avenue

In what was heralded as a “huge win” for affordable housing a few months ago, Roof Above announced the purchase of a 341-unit NOAH complex in east Charlotte. The local nonprofit plans to set aside 75 apartments for those who are experiencing long-term homelessness.
Roof Above paid $47.7 million for the 23-acre property, nearly three times the purchase price the seller paid only three years ago, property records show.

Additionally, in the last property revaluation, the county assessed the value of the site to be $24,149,400.

On the surface, it would appear that Roof Above overpaid for the property. The previous owner did make extensive upgrades to it, though. And the reality is, purchasing NOAHs is extremely competitive, said Ethridge, who helped execute the sale for Roof Above.

The point of acquiring the HillRock property was to find something with years of life left, Ethridge said. Something that didn’t require millions more in upgrades. Through deed restrictions, Roof Above plans to keep HillRock apartments affordable for at least 27 years for low-income households.

“In an environment where rents are rising, interest rates are at all-time lows, and construction costs are increasing, the value of NOAHs are going to rise. All three are happening now at a precipitous rate,” Ethridge said.

[Related Agenda story: In a ‘huge win’ for affordable housing, Roof Above buys a 341-unit apartment complex off Eastway Drive]

HillRock Estates (courtesy of Roof Above)

There are a few other groups that’ve also worked to preserve older, affordable apartments around Charlotte.

• In 2019, affordable-housing developer Vitus and the Affordable Housing Institute purchased Heritage Park Apartments, CBJ wrote. The joint venture said it would renovate the property while keeping units affordable.
• The city last year approved plans to spend $2.1 million to renovate the Sharon Oaks apartments in east Charlotte. The complex dates back to the early 1960s and has two-bedroom units for under $900, the Observer reported. Laurel Street Residential, a developer focused on affordable housing, and Ascent Real Estate Capital, bought the complex in spring 2019 and have said they plan to keep the units affordable.
• Also last year, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing Partnership (CMHP) bought the 91-unit Wendover Walk apartment complex. The local nonprofit made capital improvements and has capped rents at between $785-$1,010.

CMHP is bidding to buy two other NOAH complexes in Charlotte, according to Julie Porter, the organization’s president. Purchasing NOAHs is very difficult with so much outside investor interest, though.

In 2018, CMHP tried to acquire the 348-unit, 1970s-era Arcadian Village complex, but a company affiliated with Miami-based Monument Real Estate Services outbid them. Last summer, CMHP tried to buy the Lake Arbor apartments, built in 1974, but a New York real estate company, URS Capital, outbid them by about $2 million. The new owners ordered all tenants to move out while renovations are underway.

“It is very difficult without significant promised resources to purchase any type of NOAH complex,” Porter said. “We’re having to overbid in order to acquire these properties.”

Given the demand from local population growth, Charlotte has a shortage of about 34,000 affordable housing units, the city has said.
The need is greatest for households who make 30 percent or less of the area’s median income (AMI), or about $25,050 for a family of four.

“The more severe the difference between supply and demand, the more opportunity there is for people to raise rent,” Ethridge said of developers that flip NOAHs. “It’s a recipe for a lot of investment by a lot of private equity.”

Ethridge sees NOAH preservation as a key part in addressing affordable housing.

That’s why last month, Ascent Housing worked with Erskine Bowles and Nelson Schwab to launch a $58 million fund to purchase about 1,500 NOAH units around Charlotte. It’s called the Housing Impact Fund.

Here’s a bit more about the fund:

• The goal is to buy existing apartments and place deed restrictions on them to keep them affordable.
• The fund comprises investments from local corporations and individuals, including Schwab, Bowles, Truist, LendingTree, Atrium, and Movement Mortgage.
• Truist will serve as the fund’s lead investor, committing $15 million.
• The fund plans to acquire communities in “opportunity-rich neighborhoods” within a few miles of Uptown.

What’s next? Through the new fund, Ascent is acquiring the 144-unit Lake Mist apartment complex in southwest Charlotte near Archdale Drive and South Boulevard. The deal closes this week. Ascent will make significant upgrades to the property, including replacing roofs and siding, and repairing the parking lot.

But it will remain affordable for low-income residents. The majority of units will be for people who make 60 percent or less AMI.

For this development, the city and county recently approved a NOAH rental subsidy pilot program. A third-party administrator will identify tenants most in need of financial assistance and administer subsidies on behalf of the city/county.

“We’re not in the business of trying to create luxury units in these older properties to get the most rent,” Ethridge says.

“We’re getting units that are clean, safe, warm, and dry and trying to keep them as affordable as we can.”

This is sad but also a double edged sword, on the one hand I remember growing up in apartments off Milton and other spots on the eastside that were super cheap and affordable for my family while not being worst shytholes I ever lived in BUT I also remember getting robbed a bunch, coming out to our car missing, and shyt getting wild after dark.

it’s crazy to see that spike in rent though, everyone found out how nice Charlotte was and how cheap it was to live there and pushed everyone out of town smh

 

[CarmelBarbie]

My dream place to live is in the Wellington Community area over there in the 28269 area still close to Harris and Concord.

I just LOVE they houses over there and it’s park plus it has like a recreation center with a pool and etc.

Second choice is anywhere in Highland Creek

I live in highland creek. We have five pools breh. One with a slide. The principle is black at the elementary school. My neighbors are too, I love it.

But if we stay remote at my job, I may end up moving out of state. I’m bored with Charlotte and have been for a minute.

 

[Bryan Danielson]

This is sad but also a double edged sword, on the one hand I remember growing up in apartments off Milton and other spots on the eastside that were super cheap and affordable for my family while not being worst shytholes I ever lived in BUT I also remember getting robbed a bunch, coming out to our car missing, and shyt getting wild after dark.

it’s crazy to see that spike in rent though, everyone found out how nice Charlotte was and how cheap it was to live there and pushed everyone out of town smh

Maaaaaaan they trynna buy fukking EVERYTHING!

Like everyday whether my house or my cell via calls and texts..... someone reaching out wanting to buy my current house.

Like niccas harassing my mom and she lives in WS. I see what time it is though. I never plan on selling. More reason I’m trynna get a new house and I’m gonna rent this one out