Dallas News runs major story on CityWalk@Akard

Thanks to Roy Appleton from The Dallas Morning News for covering our recent event at our Downtown building. Here is the full story:

Low-income housing set to open by spring in downtown Dallas
http://www.nbc5i.com/news/17313522/detail.html

03:19 PM CDT on Tuesday, August 26, 2008
By ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning News
rappleton@dallasnews.com

With all its funding now in place, a project to bring low-income housing to downtown Dallas is moving toward occupancy by next spring, leaders of the effort said today.

“It’s good for us to know that it’s really going to get built,” John Greenan, executive director of the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation, told an audience gathered in the cavernous, bare-walled ground-floor space of what will become City Walk at Akard.

There, at 511 N. Akard St., workers are transforming a 15-story office building, vacant since the early 1990s, into offices, retail space and 205 residences, 50 of which will be reserved for the formerly homeless.

“This is about more than housing. This is about people, many of whom are on our streets today,” said Larry James, chief executive of Central Dallas Ministries, a project sponsor.

In time, his organization and the central Dallas development corporation will move their offices to the building. Project developers are talking with a restaurant and book store about the ground floor retail space.

But the focus of the project is housing. Four of five 15th-floor penthouses have been sold. The remaining 200 units, most of them one-bedroom efficiencies, will be rented to applicants who meet income guidelines — generally less than about $27,000 a year for one person.

“This is about high quality, affordable housing for people who want to work downtown,” Mr. James told the crowd of about 100 people.

Two years in the works, the $35 million project will draw on public and private dollars in reviving a structure built in 1958 by the Baptist church’s annuity investment board.

Private investors have put in about $15 million through the purchase of government tax credits. Private donors have contributed more than $6 million. The city is providing $2.25 million from federal community development block grants and the bond issue that built the city’s new homeless shelter. Private loans will make up the rest.

The Rees-Jones Foundation, created by Dallas oil billionaire Trevor Rees-Jones and his wife Jan, provided $5 million of the private donations. Without that support, “this deal would have failed,” Mr. James said this morning. “It enabled us to work with banks and take on debt.”

The community development corporation will manage and in time own the project with help from Central Dallas Ministries.

Mayor Tom Leppert praised the partners and supporters for “bringing together a vacant building and need for permanent affordable housing” downtown. “It’s amazing what perseverance and commitment can achieve,” he said.

Opponents have said they fear the project will increase crime and loitering, as well as be dangerous to children at a nearby private school.

One of those critics, downtown housing developer Larry Hamilton, said Monday that his concerns have eased, in part because the development corporation and ministries group will office at the site.

“I think they are going to be on top of their game,” he said. “Pulling people off the streets is laudable. I hope it works.”