Rehabbed Landmark Revives a Neighborhood

By Bendix Anderson

CAMDEN, NJ. - Every school day, thousands of children come to Camden High School in this city's Parkside neighborhood. Until recently, though, a cluster of abandoned buildings provided a sharp counterpoint to the center of learning across the street.

The crumbling buildings were landmarks in Parkside, a neighborhood struggling with blight and abandonment. Now, two affordable housing developers are working to turn the neighborhood around, and they've started by fixing up and expanding one of the buildings, the historic Pearlye Building, and knocking down the rest to create Faison Mews, an affordable housing development with 51 new apartments for low-income seniors.

Renovating the old apartment building is an obvious first step in stabilizing the neighborhood. As soon as they opened in May and June 2006, the apartments rented to neighborhood seniors, and the development has more than 50 names on its waiting list. Since the renovation, property values in the neighborhood seem to have finally stabilized.

"The abandonment has stopped," said Charles Lewis, vice president of Pennrose Properties, LLC, a Philadelphia-based affordable housing developer.

Pennrose partnered to develop Faison Mews with Parkside Business and Community in Partnership, Inc., (PBCIP), a neighborhood nonprofit that has rehabilitated about 35 abandoned homes in the blocks around Faison Mews.

Although PBCIP already had possession of the Pearlye Building, it took three years and a lawsuit against the owner of a boarded-up apartment building on the site for the partnership to gather the land it needed for development. In 2005, the developers began construction on Faison Mews, named after Camden's new mayor, Gwendolyn Faison. The redevelopment created 10 apartments in the Pearlye Building and built another 41 units in a new extension to the Pearlye, for a total of 51.

Faison Mews is designed to use less energy than conventional construction. The cost of gas heat at Faison Mews already appears to be 30 percent below the cost to heat a comparable conventional building. The structure also catches rainwater from its roof to water the gardens at the community, saving on the property's water bill.

In total, green ideas like these added $250,000 to the cost to develop the $9 million project. New Jersey officials repaid that by increasing the soft financing they offered Faison Mews through the Balanced Housing Program to $2.5 million.

The development received about $5.9 million in LIHTC equity. Centerline Capital Group was the syndicator. The project also received $250,000 in soft financing from the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York; $200,000 in soft financing from Camden's HOME Funds; $99,229 from Pennrose's deferred developer fee; and a $64,850 rebate from the federal Energy Star program.

The Pearlye Building, built in 1910, had been abandoned since the 1980s. "Even vacant, with the windows battered open and graffiti and everything, it still had a certain majesty," Lewis said.