Dispatches from our Real Estate Team

Affordable housing access to our community 

Self-Help’s Real Estate Team has been working on affordable housing since the mid-1990s. As the affordable housing crisis has deepened across much of the country, our approach has broadened to include rental housing development and preservation. This work has been added alongside our long-standing efforts to support home ownership by developing single-family homes in neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment.   

Among the team's affordable housing developments in the works in 2023 were:

• Ashton Place, a 51-unit affordable senior rental housing community under construction in downtown Durham, NC, adjacent to the city's main bus station and across from the award-winning 82-unit Willard Street Apartments (completed in 2021).   
• Hardee Street Apartments, 132 affordable rental apartments under construction in northeast central Durham, in partnership with nonprofit developer DHIC, Inc., which is our partner at Ashton and Willard too.
• Scattered site affordable housing development in central city neighborhoods in Rocky Mount, NC, which thus far has resulted in renovation of 39 affordable rental apartments and three new homes for sale, with more in the planning phase.
• A pilot effort to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing, with the first acquisition (a 230-unit apartment complex in Durham) completed in early 2023 and more underway.  
• Completion of 33 mixed income apartments in 2005 at Revolution Mill as part of a mixed-use redevelopment of the approximately 150,000 square feet historic Mill House building in Greensboro, NC. 

Kenya Spivey, Self-Help's Director of Partnerships & Community Engagement.

Other work currently underway includes: 

• A two-phase affordable rental housing development in the early concept stage in Oakland, CA's Fruitvale neighborhood near the BART commuter rail station and the bus rapid transit corridor. 
• A mixed-use affordable rental-over-commercial project in predevelopment in the center of Chicago's Little Village adjacent to our Self-Help Federal Credit Union branch building. 
• Homestead Gardens, a mixed income new neighborhood in predevelopment in Chapel Hill, NC that will feature approximately 90 affordable rental and homeownership opportunities.  The project is a collaboration led by Self-Help in close partnership with the Town of Chapel Hill (who established the basic parameters for the project and contributed land and funding), and nonprofit housing developers CASA, Community Home Trust, and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County.