Fresh Foods

CitySquare

June 28, 2013 by

In 1988, Dallas businessman Jim Sowell was moved by his concern for the problems associated with homelessness and poverty. He took action in response to the human suffering he observed by working with friends to launch the Central Dallas Food Pantry in a strip shopping center at Henderson and Central Expressway.

In 1990, the organization received status as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation and, due to its growth, relocated to larger quarters at 801 N. Peak in East Dallas. In August 1994, current President and CEO, Larry James, joined the organization. Shortly afterwards, Central Dallas Food Pantry began doing business as Central Dallas Ministries and the organization acquired an additional building at 409 N. Haskell, the current location of its food pantry.

On Monday, October 25, 2010 Central Dallas Ministries officially launched under the new name CitySquare. CitySquare offers a variety of poverty-fighting programs throughout Dallas as well as in Houston, San Antonio and Austin, based on four core values: Community, Faith, Justice and Stewardship.

In February, 2012, CitySquare partnered with Crescent Growth Capital (“CGC”) to develop a financing package for a comprehensive “Opportunity Center” at the Southeast corner of I-30 and Malcolm X Blvd. The Opportunity Center, a joint effort between CitySquare, PepsiCo, Inc., and Workforce Solutions of Greater Dallas, is a $14MM multi-service 52,000 square foot facility. It will provide a food distribution center, a new state of the art wellness center, a comprehensive employment training center that will house new offices for Work Force Solutions of Greater Dallas and CitySquare’s WorkPaths employment training division, CitySquare’s AmeriCorps headquarters/offices, and staging areas for CitySquare’s growing Summer and After-School Feeding Program funded by the Texas Department of Agriculture.

In addition, the Center will place key services and economic opportunities in one central location. Currently, our Resource Center/Food Pantry, wellness activities and WorkPaths employment program are located in three separate facilities. Centralizing these key services will create greater economies of scale in staff and resources, and allow us to serve more of our neighbors. Moreover, the Center will leverage our existing partnerships to promote greater stability in the workforce, the programs at the Center, and the overall community.

In June, 2013, CGC helped CitySquare and its partners close and fund a $12.5MM Federal Qualified Equity Investment, utilizing a $12.5MM allocation of Federal New Markets Tax Credits, provided by the Dallas Development Fund, and leveraging $4.1MM of NMTC equity provided by AT&T Corp.

Myrtle Banks

May 17, 2013 by

At its mid-20th century heyday, the Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard corridor – then called Dryades Street – was simultaneously a welcoming retail area for New Orleans’ African American population and the center of Orthodox Judaism for the region. By the 1970s, however, the street was in steep decline, with the relocation of synagogues to the suburbs and the retail strip’s raison d’être removed by desegregation. For nearly 40 years, repeated revitalization attempts consistently faltered, despite O.C. Haley Boulevard’s proximity to both downtown New Orleans and St. Charles Avenue.

Since 2005 investment in the corridor has slowly gathered steam, with non-profit groups like Café Reconcile joining with public bodies like the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (NORA) to focus on the O.C. Haley corridor. Amidst this gathering momentum, New Orleans-based Alembic Community Development identified the former Myrtle Banks School as a prime target for redevelopment. Constructed as McDonogh 38 Elementary School in 1910, the historic structure was deemed surplus in 2002 and closed. A dramatic fire ravaged the shuttered property in 2008, transforming it into an enormous, conspicuous eyesore one block away from NORA’s new headquarters building. Undaunted, Alembic envisioned the adaptive re-use of the school building as a commercial office and fresh food hub for the surrounding low income community.

While Alembic had successfully completed a number of projects employing Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, Myrtle Banks presented the development company with its first opportunity to use New Markets and historic tax credits. In July 2011, Alembic hired Crescent Growth Capital to structure and close the financing for the project. After nearly two years of work, the financing for Myrtle Banks closed in May of 2013, with CGC incorporating New Markets Tax Credit, federal and state historic tax credits, a subordinated loan, sponsor equity, and CDBG dollars sourced from NORA and Louisiana’s Office of Community Development to fund the $13.8 million redevelopment of the school.

Now under construction, the Myrtle Banks Redevelopment will be anchored by a 23,000 square-foot grocery store, the Dryades Public Market, which will seek to make available locavore produce at an affordable price point.

The Myrtle Banks redevelopment also features 10,000 square feet of landscaped green space/edible landscape and 11,000 square feet of small business office space; 25-30 permanent, full-time jobs will be created.

San Antonio Food Bank

June 20, 2012 by

Founded in 1980, the San Antonio Food Bank (“SAFB”) is a non-profit organization that serves as a clearinghouse, receiving and storing donated food, fresh produce, and other groceries. SAFB distributes these items in manageable quantities to over 500 independent partner agencies that help people in need. However, SAFB’s activities are not limited to distributing food to street-level food kitchens; the food bank also encourages better nutrition throughout the region via additional services, and operates programs to help individuals escape the poverty that produces chronic hunger.

San Antonio Food Bank’s activities meaningfully improve the lives of thousands throughout the organization’s sixteen-county service area. Every week, 58,000 people receive food as a consequence of SAFB’s programs. SAFB directly operates three community kitchens in the area, including the facility located at San Antonio’s Haven For Hope homelessness social service campus. The food bank sponsors initiatives targeting seniors and children, and, using repurposed beer trucks, delivers perishable fresh foods to partner agencies that lack refrigeration facilities onsite.

The region served by SAFB struggles with an average 20.5% poverty rate, with correspondingly high rates of food insecurity. San Antonio’s Bexar County is burdened by a 25.1% poverty rate, and 32.5% of residents within the highly-distressed low income census tract housing SAFB’s facility live in poverty. The poverty rate is known to closely approximate rates of food insecurity; individuals below the poverty line face painful trade-offs every day, with half reporting that they often have to choose between paying rent and buying food.

The now-financed SAFB expansion project will double the size of the facility, to 204,000 square feet, and will bring a significant benefit to the region. The project will create 105 direct FTE jobs and 50 construction jobs, with most permanent jobs in facility operations (warehousing, truck drivers). A direct economic impact of $50 million for the Bexar County economy is anticipated. Freezer space will triple in size, permitting SAFB to accept an additional 7 million lbs/year of high-quality, protein-rich foods. Annual fresh produce capacity will also triple, to 81 million lbs/year, and the expansion will accommodate an additional 41,600 hours of volunteer labor a year. Notably, SAFB’s new facility will permit the food bank to accept donations from an additional 20 grocery stores operated by local chain HEB, meaning that all 44 regional HEB stores would participate in donating short-shelf items to SAFB.

Currently, forty-five percent of all donations are perishable, and this proportion will grow as best practices demand that those suffering from food insecurity receive nutritionally beneficial assistance. Encouraging a healthy San Antonio is, along with feeding the hungry and ameliorating poverty, a key element of SAFB’s mission. Increasing the amount of space available to store perishables meaningfully aids this ongoing initiative, especially since the food bank’s service area suffers from above-average rates of obesity and diabetes. Within Bexar County itself, 65.8% of adults are overweight or obese, and 15.6% of residents are diabetic, twice the national average. Promoting the consumption of fresh foods, including plentiful servings of fruits and vegetables, also reinforces federal government policies designed to encourage fresh food consumption and eliminate food deserts.

In recent years, non-profits such as SAFB have experienced increasing difficulty in fundraising, due to the nation’s weak economic recovery from the Great Recession. The $27 million NMTC financing structured by Crescent Growth Capital for the San Antonio Food Bank will generate upwards of $4 million in bottom-line subsidy for the facility expansion.

Significantly, this benefit lets SAFB continue to direct all monetary contributions it receives toward supporting ongoing operations and programming. For instance, funding for SAFB’s continuing efforts at nutrition education will not diminish. Ongoing programming, such as the Summer Food Service Program for children and the Healthy Options Program for the Elderly (“HOPE”), will receive more resources.

Absent the NMTC financing, the timetable to complete the expansion would have been highly uncertain, held hostage by the limited amount of philanthropic dollars available within SAFB’s sixteen-county service region, and the food bank’s programming would doubtless have suffered greatly as resources would have been diverted from operations to help finance the facility expansion.

The Keith Corporation Shopping Centers

May 30, 2011 by

In years past, the fate of many a small town was tied to the factory where seemingly all the town’s inhabitants had worked for generations. When the steel mill closed, or the auto plant, or the tire factory, that town changed overnight from a stable, viable place of opportunity to a depressed also-ran.

Nowadays, it is often the shuttered big box chain store that can single-handedly imperil a town’s fortunes, as the tax revenue and jobs the store supported disappears, leaving behind a festering symbol of disinvestment. These dark big boxes, invariably championed prior to their construction as the guarantors of a community’s future, now resist re-use and end up decaying for years after their closure.

Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the small towns of Claypool Hill, VA (Pop. 1,719) and Wilkesboro, NC (Pop. 3,159) have struggled in recent decades. Rural in character and located at the western fringes of their states, both towns have suffered the loss of major industrial employers to foreign countries. These reversals were compounded by the later abandonment, in each town, of a big box store that had previously provided badly needed employment, tax revenues and essential retail services to these tiny hamlets.

The Claypool Hill Lowe’s Home Improvement and the Wilkesboro Wal-Mart shut their doors years ago; subsequently, town leaders were frustrated time and again as numerous redevelopment efforts fell flat. Finally, the Charlotte, NC-based Keith Corporation stepped into the breach, initially spending over $6 million to acquire the buildings and convert them into badly-needed community retail. The Keith Corporation attracted numerous tenants to the revitalized, formerly single-tenant big boxes, including a grocery store, pet supply and hardware stores, providing badly-needed employment, tax revenues and retail services for their communities. However, two years later the Claypool Hill building is struggling with 55% occupancy, and the Wilkesboro project cannot secure permanent financing. These two structures, both located within “highly-distressed” rural census tracts, are in need of an NMTC subsidy to gain a sustainable footing and realize their full potential.

The Keith Corporation’s commitment to returning the closed stores to commerce constituted rare good news for these regions, as is always true of a $6 million investment made in two highly-distressed, rural locations. The 225-plus construction jobs and 150 permanent positions resulting from the investment signaled better times to come, it seemed.

Nonetheless, the projects had stalled, unable to secure permanent financing. A $10 million NMTC Qualified Equity Investment was structured and closed by Crescent Growth Capital, generating a meaningful subsidy for the two rural shopping centers that will lower total project debt to sustainable levels and establish a solid foundation for continued operations and future expansion.

The New Orleans Healing Center

May 2, 2011 by

The New Orleans Healing Center serves to bridge the social divide between the two inner-city, historic neighborhoods it straddles, building inter-community trust while furthering post-Katrina recovery throughout New Orleans by providing a holistic, safe, sustainable facility that heals and empowers the individual and the community.

The Healing Center functions as a community center, offering needed retail services and supporting programs promoting physical, nutritional, emotional, intellectual and spiritual well-being. An adaptive reuse for the circa 1926 55,000-square foot former Universal Furniture Building at the intersection of St Claude and St Roch avenues in the 8th Ward of New Orleans, the center includes, among other amenities, yoga and pilates instruction, a cooperatively-owned organic grocery, a hydroponic rooftop garden, a street university, a health food café, juice bar and coffee shop with a youth training program, alternative healing, and a New Orleans Police Department substation.

Successfully executing a transaction of tremendous complexity, Crescent Growth Capital structured and closed in May of 2010 a $10.4 million New Markets Tax Credit qualified equity investment combining seven discrete funding sources to realize this project’s vision. Federal and state New Markets Tax Credits, federal and state historic tax credits, city and state CDBG dollars and sponsor equity were utilized. Construction was completed in 2011.

Lakeview Grocery

December 7, 2009 by

Essential to the ongoing post-Katrina rebuilding effort in New Orleans is the provision of needed neighborhood infrastructure. In addition to road and utility reconstruction, neighborhood recovery encompasses important services, like healthcare and grocery stores.

Crescent Growth Capital aided the rebuilding of the devastated Lakeview neighborhood, simultaneously generating job opportunities and supporting the Obama Administration’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, by structuring a $6 million New Markets Tax Credit qualified equity investment on behalf of Harrison Fresh Market, LLC.

Lakeview Grocery, a full-service 21,000 square foot store operated by local grocer Robert Fresh Market, opened in the last week of October 2010.

Fresh Foods

Contact Us

Footer