This affordable housing project has been years in the making. It may finally happen

The redevelopment of the 1950s-era Love Apartments in east Bradenton at Sixth Street Court East and Ninth Avenue East has been a goal ever since the city’s Central Community Redevelopment Agency acquired the units in 2006.

The apartment have seen better days and the city has delayed costly renovations, opting for short-term fixes with the goal being to eventually redevelop the 1.6 acre site and start from scratch.

Several efforts to accomplish that goal have failed over the years with developers unable to obtain needed financing for the project -- until now.

On its third try, Norstar successfully acquired the tax credits it need to make the redevelopment of the Love Apartments possible.

Three obstacles remain in the way of the $13 million plan to demolish the Love Apartments and build a new 50-unit Lincoln Village.

The first is the 30-day protest period where other applicants for the tax credits get to challenge the winning applications, which rarely succeeds. Economic Development Director Carl Callahan said the Lincoln Village project scored so much higher than the other successful applicants that the challenges will likely target the lower-scoring applications.

Callahan said Norstar will use that time to begin discussions with their financing institutions, but won’t likely commit to anything until the protest period ends next month. Norstar has done projects from Canada all the way to Florida and has a vast portfolio of experience behind them.

The third obstacles is what to do with the existing tenants at the existing 38-unit Love Apartments. The city, for some time, stopped leasing the units when they became available but there are still a couple dozen residents the city will have to relocate once construction starts.

“This will take quite awhile to get through the protest period and then for Norstar to get their financing together,” said Callahan. “We’ll have to figure out where we move the residents, but we have a long process to go through. It’s obviously much easier when you have an open piece of dirt as opposed to this situation, but we’ll certainly figure that out.”

The majority of the new Lincoln Village will be income-based affordable and workforce housing with only five units to be leased at the market rate.

It was good news to Ward 5 Councilman Harold Byrd who said the city should know for sure by mid June if the project will move forward as planned .

“It looks really good,” Byrd said. “So I pray and hope it all comes through.”

Callahan said the project scored so high with the Florida Housing Finance Corp. because of the city’s proven commitment.

“A couple of things made this so successful,” he said. “The first is Norstar’s partnership with us and the other thing is when you read our story about all this, it’s the positive progress we’ve had all over the area. We highlighted all the investment in and around downtown and they look at that.”

In a report to the city on the application’s success, George Kwaku, with the National Development Council, said Norstar is a “seasoned development partner,” which solely partners with housing authorities and CRAs, “Whereas other developers are ‘in the business’ and place multiple contracts on lands/properties regardless if their development projects are congruent with a city’s or CRA’s redevelopment plan.”

Kwaku also said that without all of the progress and new development taking place in the city, including market-rate housing and affordable housing projects, “We would not have scored so high on the application.”

This story was originally published April 24, 2019 at 1:20 PM.