Texas-based real estate developer Cypress Real Estate Advisors and local nonprofit organizations including The Equity Alliance, Stand Up Nashville and Nashville Organized for Action and Hope have reached an “impasse” in negotiations over a proposed community benefits agreement related to CREA’s planned redevelopment of the RiverChase Apartments site in East Nashville.
The parties met Thursday. Stand Up Nashville representatives say in a release that the sticking point was qualifications for the affordable housing units to be included in the new project. Representatives say they first proposed affordable units reserved for people making no more than 30 percent of area median income. The organization says it later upped their proposal as high as 65 percent of AMI, but CREA would not drop the qualification below 80 percent AMI. The company said this description of negotiations was inaccurate and that a portion of the units would be reserved for people making as low as 30 percent AMI.
RiverChase Apartments
“CREA didn’t know what they were getting into in negotiating a CBA, because this is a city that has let developers and investors lead the conversation about affordable housing,” Michael Callahan-Kapoor, acting executive director of SUN, says in a release. "It’s like letting a fox watch the hen house. How could this developer expect anything else but to get exactly what they want?”
Despite CREA and the nonprofit organizations failing to reach an agreement, the firm is still committing to build 220 units of affordable housing within the proposed 1,150-unit community and agree to various other community benefits, including green space.
“Unfortunately, their final-hour request to change affordability levels that deviated from previous agreements would make CREA’s unsubsidized project unfinanceable and therefore result in a loss of all potential affordable units at the RiverChase site,” CREA principal Victor Young says in a release. “This proposed development is the first of its kind in an otherwise market-rate development in the Nashville market and is a huge win for Nashville’s mission for affordable homes. We are optimistic that we will find another nonprofit who will see the value this development brings to the community and work with us on a fully committable CBA.”
The company, along with nonprofits People’s Alliance for Transit, Housing and Employment and Salvation Army, have been helping pay relocation costs for residents forced to move out of RiverChase.
Affordable Housing Resources Inc. CEO Eddie Latimer praises CREA’s efforts, including promises to work with nonprofit developers on additional affordable units.
“All new housing that is attainable for our workforce — if they earn 80 percent AMI, 60 percent AMI and even 30 percent AMI — is valuable because it is all needed by various workers and citizens of Nashville,” Latimer says. “CREA’s offer of 120 affordable units to be developed by various nonprofits and 100 workforce units to be developed at CREA’s expense is a model for other for-profit developers to follow.”
But Kay Bowers of NOAH says the development model “is unsustainable and it is going to break the city.
"We’re on a fast track to look like San Francisco, where middle- and working-class people can’t afford to live in the city at all,” she adds. “We are moving towards Nashville where not a single public worker, teacher, firefighter, restaurant worker or retail worker could afford to stay in Davidson County.”
This article first ran via our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
