There's an old, rundown church on North A Street that has blown-out windows and is scattered with construction debris. It's been vacant since Hurricane Ivan significantly damaged it and caused the congregation to move elsewhere.
To a group of four Pensacola developers, though, it's an opportunity to bring much-talked-about private investment as a solution to Pensacola's affordable housing issue.
MountLily Baptist Church is now slated to become Mount Lily Studios, a six-unit affordable housing venture targeted at the workforce housing population. The goal is to keep rent affordable to people making less the 66% of the area median income. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates place the county's median household income at about $51,000.
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"For us, all being younger people that could've moved to any other city, … we have a passion for Pensacola and realized that to keep this thing going, we need to create places where people like us could afford to live," developer John David Ellis said.
The group of developers — made up of Ellis, Jordan Yee, Jamaal Warren and Alistair McKenzie — was inspired by CivicCon, a civic education program presented by the News Journal and Studer Community Institute,to find out how best they could make a difference in the community. When they combined their backgrounds in real estate, construction and architecture, affordable housing was the most fitting option.
Pensacola's affordable housing issue has become critical as advocates and officials say the average purchase and rental prices are skyrocketing while wages aren't keeping up. Last year alone, the median purchase price for a home increased by $70,000 and the average single family rental house is on market for $1,600 per month.
Many developers are buying older or dilapidated homes and tearing them down to either sell the lots or build new construction homes worth much more, something that's visible in the Belmont-Devilliers neighborhood adjacent to the church.
But it's something these developers say they very deliberately didn't want to do.
"What we're trying to do is one small little act here to show you can do something different and there could be a different way to do business," McKenzie said.
Ellis said the hope is they will be able to help the city work through any kinks and streamline the process for private developers to start identifying blight and gain approval to rethink developing affordable housing locations creatively.
"It's easier to do the expensive stuff. The fact we have to jump through hurdles to do what we're doing is more difficult, but we're hoping to be sort of demonstrative about the difficulties we face when we build something affordable," he said. "I think there's kind of a perception that this is something reserved for nonprofits — you think about Habitat (for Humanity) or other organizations — but the reality is they don't have the bandwidth or the capital to fix the problem alone."
Currently, the MountLily building has a few gaps in the brick façade, some makeshift interior walls holding things in place and the kind of discarded items that make it clear someone broke in and stayed a while. But the building has good bones, the team says, and to build a new structure to that level of material would cost a lot more than the purchase price they negotiated.
The plan is to spend the next 18 months renovating, including taking out a drop ceiling to expose the 60-year-old wooden trusses and vaulted ceiling to make the 400- to 500-square-foot units feel more spacious.
They'll make one central corridor and six total unitsand will try work with neighbors to allay concerns with issues like street parking on A Street.
McKenzie said thatin their minds, the future tenants look like workers who are commuting to jobs downtown and can't afford — or don't want to — buy a more expensive home in the city.
"They should be able to get down to their restaurant job, to Saenger Theatreor to the museum where they work, and the property lends itself to what we're trying to do," he said.
The next step in the process is gaining conditional approval from the city to move ahead in construction, and the group expects the units to be ready to rent in 18 months if all goes to plan.
Emma Kennedy can be reached at ekennedy@pnj.com or 850-480-6979.
