Community Development

Kern’s Bakery (Kern’s Food Hall)

July 9, 2024 by

Born in Germany in 1836, Peter Kern emigrated to the United States and settled in Knoxville during the Civil War. By the third quarter of the 19^th century, Kern’s Bakery was established in downtown Knoxville, growing steadily in subsequent decades to become an established, beloved regional bakery. Acquired in 1989 by Sara Lee, the now-discontinued Kern’s brand remains a touchstone in the memories of Knoxvillians.

Sara Lee operated the principal Kern’s facility on Chapman Highway until 2012. For nearly a decade, plans gestated to redevelop the shuttered property, a prominent Knoxville landmark. In 2017, the historic bakery, constructed incrementally from 1931, was successfully listed on the National Register of Historic Places, though further development stalled after some exterior rehabilitation work was completed.

In 2019, Kern’s Bakery was acquired by a team led by Atlanta-based Mallory & Evans who envisioned a $32 million project that would convert the former Kern’s Bakery industrial facility into a mixed-use destination retail and food hall development to anchor the booming South Knoxville riverfront.

Hired to provide contingent fee-based historic preservation consulting and tax credit arranging services, Crescent Growth Capital structured a financing incorporating Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits, PACE funding, a TIF grant from Knoxville city government, bridge financing for the historic tax credit equity, and construction and senior loans. Crescent closed on the project’s financing in February of 2022 and then structured and closed, in December 2023, a financing to take out the PACE funding component.

Crescent’s in-house historic preservation specialist prepared a five-element Historic Preservation Certification Application (including multiple Part 2 amendments) over a three-year period. Part 3 approval of the HPCA was received on July 1, 2024, by which point Kern’s Food Hall had debuted, delighting Knoxvillians who still cherished memories of Peter Kern’s community business.

Allen University – Good Samaritan-Waverly

July 21, 2023 by

The mid-20^th century Good Samaritan-Waverly Hospital building represents the culmination of the efforts of Columbia’s Black residents to establish modern healthcare facilities amidst the Jim Crow system of segregation prevailing in South Carolina before the advent of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The long-anticipated fruit of the 1938 merger of the city’s Waverly and Good Samaritan Hospitals, the present building was completed as a state-of-the-art facility in 1952 and included operating rooms, x-ray equipment, fifty beds, and a nurse training facility.

Despite the hospital’s comprehensive suite of services, operating margins were tight, due to a high debt load and persistently low reimbursement rates for care. In the wake of desegregation, Richland County completed a new, racially-integrated general hospital, which prompted the closure of Good Samaritan-Waverly in 1973.

The shuttered hospital was acquired in 1987 by Allen University, an HBCU founded in 1870 whose main campus is across the street. A succession of plans were considered over the years, and in 2008 the building was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Subsequent to the appointment of President Ernest McNealey, in late 2017, plans began to coalesce around an adaptive re-use for the hospital. Fundraising commenced, but by the end of 2019 a significant gap remained.

In August of 2020, Crescent Growth Capital was hired to provide historic preservation consulting and tax credit arranger services on a contingent fee basis. Crescent authored the Historic Preservation Certification Application for South Carolina State Historic Tax Credits and Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits, successfully advancing an argument to justify the corner addition proposed for the project by pointing to the mid-block siting of the hospital at the time of its completion.

From a structuring standpoint, as tax credit arranger Crescent sourced $12 million in New Markets Tax Credit allocation authority, combined the resulting subsidy with federal and state historic tax credits, and took advantage of the South Carolina Abandoned Building Tax Credit to bring over $4 million in bottom-line benefit to the project.

In 2023, Allen University inaugurated the Waverly-Clyburn Building, within the original hospital, along with the Boeing Center auditorium, constructed as an addition. Building uses include a home for Allen’s newly-established school of education, for teacher training; a permanent home for the Institute for Civility; a newly-established South Carolina African-American Hall of Fame; and a new home for the university’s seminary.

St. Ann Square

June 21, 2021 by

Sometimes a setback paves the way for a successful project. Affordable housing developer Providence Community Housing had approached Crescent Growth Capital to determine whether historic tax credit equity could subsidize its planned 53-unit, mixed-income Sacred Heart at St. Bernard housing development. The adaptive re-use of the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church (1955) was to be teamed with new construction of an adjacent, four-story building. Unfortunately, the prescribed subdivision of the intact, historic church interior into multiple individual units could not, despite several creative design iterations suggested by Crescent, be squared with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Providence ultimately completed the project, incorporating the former church and including Crescent’s suggested design refinements, but without an HTC subsidy.

Pleased with Crescent Growth Capital’s historic preservation consulting process, its disappointing outcome in that instance notwithstanding, Providence Community Housing was receptive when Crescent reached out in late 2017, in the wake of Providence receiving an award of $7.5 million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits. While Providence had not contemplated attempting to incorporate historic tax credit equity into the capital stack for the project in question, a housing development of 59 units for low-income seniors to be called St. Ann Square, Crescent suggested that both federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits could indeed be secured.

St. Ann Square presented considerable complexity from an historic preservation consulting standpoint. The project would combine a rehabilitation of the historic St. Ann Church and School building (1924) and adjacent 19^th century structures – themselves the subject of a federal HPCA process which concluded successfully in 2002 – with the addition of two historic “shotgun” style dwellings sharing the square and the erection of a two-story, newly-constructed apartment building. The multiple historic buildings shared little to no functional relationship during their period of significance – all were contributing elements to the Esplanade Ridge National Register Historic District – which necessitated authoring six individual federal and state HPCAs.

Accordingly, Crescent’s in-house historic preservation specialist prepared and submitted no fewer than thirty-seven elements to six federal Historic Preservation Certification Applications over a three-and-a-half year period, also submitting Louisiana State HPCAs in conjunction with the federal application parts. Skillful navigation of the Secretary’s Standards was required, with particular work going into windows, exterior cladding, and the faithful conservation of remaining character-defining elements and intact interior spatial organization.

Part 3 approval for the final building was received on June 15, 2021, at which point some $4 million in federal and state historic tax credit equity had been generated to subsidize the completed $16.5 million St. Ann Square project.

First United Apartments

March 6, 2020 by

Impressed with Crescent Growth Capital’s skillful, contingent fee-based historic preservation consulting capabilities on its St. John’s Masonic project, the New Orleans Redevelopment Fund again retained Crescent to serve as historic preservation consultant on an even more daunting effort: the redevelopment of the blighted, structurally-compromised First United Baptist Church in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood.

Completed in 1940 for a congregation founded in 1907, the Central Baptist Church consisted of a sanctuary constructed in a striking Mayan Revival art deco style and an attached classroom annex. Its congregation dwindling, Central Baptist in 1993 agreed to merge with a young African-American congregation in search of a home, creating First United Baptist Church, the first instance in the nation of historically white and historically Black Southern Baptist congregations merging.

The new congregation successfully established itself but suffered a severe setback in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina-induced flooding, compounded by the sudden death of the church’s pastor, Marshall Truehill, Jr., in 2008. Plans to remediate and rededicate the facility fell by the wayside, and the sanctuary and its attached annex began to rapidly deteriorate.

Into the breach stepped the New Orleans Redevelopment Fund. Made aware by Crescent of First United’s location within the Mid-City National Register Historic District’s boundaries and period of significance, NORF made plans to acquire the former First United facility and redevelop it into twenty rental apartments. But would federal and state historic tax credits be possible, given the need to subdivide the sanctuary volume to accommodate fourteen of the planned twenty units?

Crescent quickly determined a way forward: the historic sanctuary, completed in 1940, had been downsized decades later by the Central Baptist congregation, as they no longer had need of such a large space. In effect, a “church within a church” had been constructed, with the perimeter of the historic sanctuary converted into more classroom and administrative space. The resulting sanctuary interior, Crescent argued in its HPCA, constituted a non-historic modification that had destroyed the integrity of the original interior. That the original sanctuary interior was no longer intact allowed for its subdivision, with a portion of the circa 1940 sanctuary volume expressed in a new atrium feature separating the sanctuary apartments from those in the annex. An original baptismal pool, installed in the rear wall of the sanctuary, was retained in place as a focal point for the atrium.

Meanwhile, the rear wall of the original classroom annex was suffering acute structural failure, and the entire annex had differentially settled and was pulling away from the sanctuary. Crescent’s HPCA detailed its reconstruction using salvaged decorative elements throughout the interior and ensuring its successful re-purposing as six apartments, with a subtle penthouse addition topping the reconstructed annex roof.

Crescent’s historic preservation consulting effort garnered NORF nearly $2.2 million in federal and state historic tax credits, constituting a significant subsidy for their $5.5 million First United Apartments project. Crescent also monetized the Louisiana state historic tax credits on behalf of the New Orleans Redevelopment Fund, conveying the tax credit sale proceeds to NORF’s principals in February of 2020.

For the third time in nearly as many years, Crescent Growth Capital’s historic preservation consulting work was honored by the Louisiana Landmarks Society, as First United Apartments was named a winner for Excellence in Historic Preservation in 2020.

St. John’s Masonic Apartments (Opelousas Apartments)

August 7, 2017 by

Freemasonry occupies a storied place in American history, representing an influential subset of the body politic: fraternal social organizations independent of any political or religious authority. St. John’s Masonic Temple, located within the Algiers Point National Register Historic District in New Orleans, documents that neighborhood’s participation in the surge of Masonic Temple construction that occurred throughout the United States in the 1920s. Its completion in 1926 coincided with other Masonic initiatives throughout the city, including the erection of the impressive, twenty-story Grand Lodge of Louisiana headquarters at 333 St. Charles Avenue (now a hotel).

St. John’s both evidences Freemasonry’s impact upon New Orleans and serves as an excellent example of the spare, art deco-influenced neoclassicism of the 1920s. Here, Sam Stone’s design is notable for the intricate brickwork of differing bonds executed for decorative effect, a principal element of the handsomely-finished exterior that is, overall, almost completely unaltered from its original appearance.

By the time the New Orleans Redevelopment Fund acquired the building in 2014, its use as the gathering place for a fraternal organization was decades in the past. The Masons vacated 620 Opelousas after World War II; it subsequently served as a neighborhood post office for many years. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the building was acquired for conversion into multifamily housing, but the development stalled after the completion of much interior demolition, the insertion of new wooden framing and MEP elements, and the addition of interior steel stairs.

NORF hired Crescent Growth Capital to provide contingent fee-based historic preservation consulting and historic tax credit monetization services, in support of its $3.6 million redevelopment of St. John’s Masonic into ten market-rate apartments.

Crescent’s in-house historic preservation specialist prepared a four-element Historic Preservation Certification Application over a thirty-month period, submitting Louisiana State HPCAs in conjunction with the federal application parts. Part 3 approval was received on April 28, 2017, with state historic tax credit monetization accomplished by Crescent and tax credit sale proceeds delivered to NORF in July.

For the second time in nearly as many years, Crescent Growth Capital’s historic preservation consulting work was honored by the Louisiana Landmarks Society, as Opelousas Apartments received an Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation in 2019.

The Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery

February 23, 2016 by

Arguably America’s most unique city, New Orleans often triggers in its visitors demand for equally unique lodging options. When New York-based GB Lodging and its partners opted to acquire the Ambassador Hotel in 2013, they intended upon retaining its unconventional elements while updating its décor and amenities. The relaunched hotel, dubbed the Old No. 77, situates upscale, contemporary lodging within an inimitable collection of 19th and early-20th century buildings.

GB Lodging hired CGC to apply for and monetize the state historic tax credits generated by this $33 million project. Directed by the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation to prepare four sets of historic preservation certification applications – reflecting the past commercial associations of the six individual buildings comprising the Old No. 77 – CGC secured eligibility for state credits and approval of the proposed design without any conditions attached.

Shepherding the project through the Louisiana Department of Revenue’s exacting review process, CGC had over $11 million classed as Qualified Rehabilitation Expenses. CGC marketed the resulting credits and secured an above-market price for its client, who received nearly $2.3 million in sale proceeds in February 2016.

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