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Business View Magazine
very low homeownership rates,” Johnson explains.
“Similar to the strategy in revitalizing Durham’s down-
town, our goal was to make strategic investments in
that neighborhood so that the private market would
eventually come in and build on its own. Prior to the
City’s investments, a person could not come in and
build a house and sell it for what he or she built it for
because of the challenges in the neighborhood.”
“In addition, the City owned a 19-acre site that, over
the past 20 years, had had two failed developers. The
city had to foreclose on the second developer and
subsequently owned major portions of the site with
along with approximately 50 other individual owners,”
Johnson continues. “The question was, in this near-
downtown neighborhood, was there any other way we
could create an environment where private dollars
could come in to help us reinvigorate it? So, we began
buying out the other owners in order to gain control of
the entire site, and we worked with the leadership in
the community and decided to come up with a multi-
pronged approach that included the creation of some
high-quality apartments using Low-Income Housing
Tax Credits. The unique thing about those 132 units in
12 buildings is that 80 of the units are affordable and
income-based while 52 units are at market-rate.
“The project needed to be positioned to attract people
who enjoy housing options as well as provide quality
housing for people who were living on a fixed-income or
at a low to moderate income level. The City of Durham
selected a nationally regarded developer - McCormack
Baron Salazar - that was successful in being awarded
tax credits. The developer advised the City that for
this project to be successful it needed to have a larger
footprint and that larger footprint included an adjacent
