最新杏吧原创

ST. LOUIS 鈥� McCormack Baron Salazar is finally starting the latest phase of a $111 million revamp of the 500-plus unit Preservation Square housing complex.

Among the hurdles the developer cleared to tee up the rehab of 91 units of mixed income housing near the intersection of 14th Street and Cass Avenue: a settlement late last year with the Carr Square Tenant Corporation, run by Rodney Hubbard Sr. of the politically influential Hubbard family.

McCormack Baron co-founder Richard Baron said Friday the firm was able to buy out Carr Square鈥檚 ownership stake in the property where the latest phase is poised to begin.

鈥淲e arrived at a settlement,鈥� Baron said Friday. 鈥淲e had never intended not to have them involved. The problem was simply there was overreach and, anyway, it got resolved. The lawyers worked it out. They disappeared, and we鈥檙e moving ahead.鈥�

A lawyer who represented Carr Square referred questions to the housing corporation. Rodney Hubbard could not be reached for comment.

For 最新杏吧原创 and its hopes of future federal grant awards, the project north of downtown is an important one, underwritten with a competitive $30 million Housing and Urban Development grant awarded back in 2016, when Francis Slay was still mayor. Matt Moak, former director of the city鈥檚 Community Development Administration, which administers the HUD grant, in 2020 called the project 鈥渢oo big to fail.鈥�

The HUD money was supposed to have been used by the end of last year. HUD granted an extension because of the pandemic, and the developer now says it expects to spend the remainder of the grant this year.

Even before the pandemic, the project faced obstacles, mostly political.

McCormack Baron blamed delays on former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens鈥� attempt to kill a low-income housing tax credit. Later, it said a hostile alderwoman 鈥� Tammika Hubbard, Rodney Hubbard鈥檚 daughter 鈥� stymied the project by blocking requests for city right-of-way and local property tax breaks.

But representatives for the Hubbards accused McCormack Baron of reneging on a promise to incorporate the crumbling Carr School into the project as a new community center to serve the housing units Carr Square owns and manages. They said McCormack Baron tried to cut them out of the project despite Carr Square鈥檚 partial ownership of a portion of Preservation Square 鈥� the portion now nearing groundbreaking.

McCormack Baron insisted that Carr Square and their attorneys were trying to gain undue leverage over the project through legal agreements, a claim Carr Square countered was to protect their interests after being burned by the developer before.

The dispute, and questions about Carr Square鈥檚 ownership stake, caught the attention of HUD. The city and McCormack Baron tried to assure the agency that Carr Square鈥檚 ownership was negligible.

Then, Tammika Hubbard narrowly lost her election in 2021, and a new alderman helped McCormack Baron win tax breaks and other action from a city whose bureaucracy often relies on the blessing of an alderman. New apartments have been popping up along Cass Avenue for the past several years, replacing the older Preservation Square models that had housed residents for decades.

On Tuesday, a city development board advanced a measure authorizing the agreements necessary to begin the fourth phase.

Since 2018, McCormack Baron, one of the nation鈥檚 largest for-profit developers of affordable housing, has won five rounds of low-income housing tax credits for Preservation Square from the Missouri Housing Development Corporation. In all, the awards have given the developer access to some $74 million in state and federal tax credits, each allocation paid out over 10 years, to finance the project. The first round of credits was awarded in 2018 to help finance the initial phase.

The city has chipped in with a $750,000 grant paid with federal pandemic relief money. And in this latest phase, the Missouri Department of Economic Development is contributing another $5 million.

Another phase of the project 鈥� a revamp of the nearby Brewery Apartments in the old Falstaff Brewery 鈥� could begin later this year, said McCormack Baron鈥檚 senior vice president of development, Emily Baron Bernstein.

To finance the project鈥檚 final phase, along 14th Street just south of where the current phase is about to begin, 最新杏吧原创 Development Corporation CEO Neal Richardson plans to write a letter of support for another round of low-income housing tax credits. Missouri is expected to consider low-income tax credit applications later this year.