Announcing St. Paul’s Home! (In Minneapolis.)

With the Kyle Garden Square Grand Opening behind us (see below for more on that!) and 2116 Nicollet proceeding toward a hopeful late summer groundbreaking, it’s time to announce the next project in the Alliance pipeline! 

Yes, it’s called St. Paul’s Home and it’s in Minneapolis. We’re still getting used to that too.

Built in 1974, the homes in St. Paul’s Home are a mixture of studio and one-bedroom apartments. The building is fully leased and home to seniors with low incomes, including a great many immigrants, in need of housing they can afford. The age of the building, however, has become an issue with extensive rehabilitation necessary to keep it a nice place to live. As the cost of the needed rehabilitation far exceeds the rents paid by residents, the current non-profit owner of the building went searching for an organization with the expertise to purchase the property, obtain the necessary rehab funding, and then own the building going forward. That organization is Alliance. 

As with each Alliance project, the bulk of the capital funding will come from governmental sources. The first application has already gone out to Hennepin County, an application will soon go out to the City of Minneapolis, and this summer we’ll be submitting to Minnesota Housing’s annual “super RFP” looking for either Housing Infrastructure Bonds (used for Kyle Garden Square) or Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (being used for 2116 Nicollet).

Not all funding will come from public sources, however. Over the last couple years Minnesota has overseen the State Housing Tax Credit Program and Contribution Fund that allows individuals and companies to obtain tax credits by designating contributions to projects like St. Paul’s Homes. The program opens in February and this year all available tax credits were claimed within 2 hours of becoming available. In that brief window of time, though, Alliance supporter Sunrise Banks made a $100,000 contribution to St. Paul’s Home! While there is still plenty of work to be done on raising capital funding, getting that first money in is vital and we are very thankful for Sunrise Banks’ contribution and partnership over the years. Thank you, Sunrise!

We will of course keep you, our supporters, in the loop on full capital funding progress and then look forward to the rehab itself. The hope is that residents won’t even need to temporarily move out of their homes during the rehab work, and they’ll simply need to be away from home during a few daytime periods and let the contractors work around their belongings.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to preserve and rehabilitate these vital homes for seniors in the heart of South Minneapolis!