Healthcare/Wellness

Former Belleville School to become apartments for the elderly

June 6, 2011 by Crescent Growth Capital, LLC

The Times-Picayune, June 6, 2011

A historic and dilapidated former Algiers school is getting new life with plans to convert the long vacant building into apartments for senior citizens and the disabled.

The former Belleville School, portions of which have been in disrepair for decades, is set to undergo a $13 million renovation to create 52 assisted-living apartments. Construction could be complete by February, said Sean Arrillaga, a vice president for St. Luke’s Living Center in Algiers, one of the partners in the renovation deal.

Most apartments will be about 550 square feet, which Arrillaga said is larger than the current market average.

The group closed on the school site at 813 Pelican Ave in May, and demolition of the interior has begun, he said. Arrillaga declined to identify the other investors in the project, but said the project will qualify for state and federal historic tax credits, along with new markets tax credits.

The group decided to renovate the Belleville School because of the surrounding neighborhood, Arrillaga said. He called Algiers Point a “quaint, historic neighborhood.”

Cecelia Hemelt, who will be the administrator of the 56,000-square-foot property, said the neighborhood is a good fit.

“We really liked the location and the community of Algiers Point,” she said.

Hemelt said the apartments will be geared toward residents 55 and older or high-functioning disabled people. There will be a director of nursing on duty during the day and several aides there around the clock. All rooms will have handrails and other amenities to provide easier access.

Belleville School’s current makeover as an assisted-living facility is just the latest twist in its saga, which includes several failed redevelopments in the past two decades. The school has been vacant since 1987, and through the years developers have envisioned it as condominiums, a hotel and spa, and, in 1989, apartments for senior citizens and the disabled. The main structure of the school — a three-story, red-brick building — was completed in 1898, and wooden annexes were built in 1907 and 1925.

Skip Gallagher, the president of the Algiers Point Association, said the group is excited to finally see some action occurring at the school site after years of watching the building deteriorate. He said an assisted-living facility is one of the best uses for the building, and he doubts it will be a large drain on parking in the surrounding neighborhood, which was a concern of some residents. Gallagher said it would have been far worse if the abandoned building continued to be a blight on the Point.

“For the most part, we’re encouraged by it,” said Gallagher, adding that it’s great to see a historic building salvaged instead of demolished by neglect. “The biggest concern we had was that it wouldn’t happen. That would be criminal.”

Old Universal Furniture store morphs into the Healing Center

April 11, 2011 by Crescent Growth Capital, LLC

The Times-Picayune, April 11, 2011

What a long, strange trip it’s been for the former home of the Universal Furniture store in Faubourg Marigny.

The run-down building, which flooded after the levee failures in 2005, had a brief but head-scratching post-Hurricane Katrina life as a temporary home for both the New Orleans Police Department’s 5th District station and the avant-garde Prospect.1 art exhibit.

Now, the one-time retail space is morphing into the New Orleans Healing Center, an eclectic, new-age development.

Spearheaded by Voodoo priestess, artist and writer Sallie Ann Glassman and her high-profile longtime companion, developer Pres Kabacoff, the site is about to become a community center where neighborhood residents can buy food from a cooperative grocery, get a micro-loan, find worship space or take a yoga class.

The $13.2 million project grew out of a series of meetings organized by Glassman and her friends after the storm. The group identified a need for a center where wellness services and amenities would be offered to those struggling to rebuild both physically and spiritually.

“We didn’t want it to be a spa or a resort in the country,” Glassman said. “We wanted it to be integrated into the community.”

‘It just felt right’

The group chose a complex of two-story buildings that formerly housed Universal Furniture. The complex included an 1840s cornerstore and residence, a large 1926 commercial structure and a smaller commercial building, all united behind a 1960s-era metal screen that obscured the buildings’ architectural features. Situated at the corner of St. Claude and St. Roch avenues, the complex sits across from the iconic St. Roch market building.

“When we first visited the Universal building, it was dark and labyrinthine,” Glassman said. “Three buildings had been joined together and divided up. But when we went up onto the roof, all of a sudden there was this beautiful view of the city and the skyline. It just felt right.”

Kabacoff undertook the rehabilitation of the 55,000-square-foot complex independently of HRI Properties, where he is chief executive officer.

Renovation work began last May, financed by a blend of state and federal New Markets Tax Credits and historic tax credits, as well as allocations from city and state redevelopment agencies.

The exterior, where metal screens once hung, is painted in a Caribbean-inspired color palette, with bright purples, oranges and teals. Infrastructure work, including new Sheetrock, has been installed and primed, and tenants are in the process of customizing their stores.

Free barbecue, open house

To celebrate this milestone and further acquaint the public with the project, the Healing Center plans a free community barbecue and open house on Sunday, April 17, from 2 to 6 p.m.

“The Building Block should be open by then,” said Glassman, referring to a consortium of green and sustainable businesses. “Others will still be in the process of their build-outs when we have the barbecue, but will be fully open by May 1. A few others will take a little longer. So May is our soft opening and we’ll have a grand opening in July.”

In addition to Glassman’s business, Island of Salvation Botanica, which specializes in Voodoo religious supplies, medicinal herbs and Haitian artwork, the complex will house up to 20 more enterprises.

They include Fatoush Restaurant and Juice Bar; ASI Federal Credit Union; Crossroads Arts Bazaar, a place where local artists can sell their work; Wild Lotus Yoga Studio; Café Istanbul Performance Hall, a combination meeting space and performance venue; and the New Orleans Food Co-op, a 4,000-square-foot full-service grocery store. Currently, about 85 percent of the center is leased.

A long-needed grocery

Lori Burge, general manager the food co-op, said the grocery is one of the businesses that requires a longer build-out period than others because of the need to install refrigeration equipment and shelving. The store will sell fresh food to the Marigny and St. Roch neighborhoods, areas that have been without a grocery since the Robert’s market on St. Claude Avenue closed. To secure the final piece of its financing, the co-op is trying to recruit an additional 200 member-owners.

Crossroads Arts Bazaar director Lorien Bales said her gallery is timing its opening to coincide with that of the co-op.

“Foot traffic will be key,” Bales said.

Glassman believes that the Healing Center will bridge the Marigny and St. Roch neighborhoods, catalyze revitalization of the St. Claude Main Street corridor and help encourage other projects, like the resurrection of the St. Roch Market and the installation of a streetcar line.

“It’s interesting to me that the physical work on the buildings turned out to be a healing process in a way,” she said. “We took these totally neglected and sad buildings and restored the facades and opened them up and healed what had been done to them. Now everyone who visits … just feels uplifted by the open spaces and all the light.”

St. Margaret’s pushes for 2012 opening of nursing home within former Mercy Hospital

February 9, 2011 by Crescent Growth Capital, LLC

The Times-Picayune, February 8, 2011

In the next 60 days, contractors for St. Margaret’s Daughters, a Catholic church-affiliated nonprofit health-care provider, are scheduled to begin limited demolition work as part of the redevelopment of the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in Mid-City.

The first phase of the redevelopment is a nursing facility projected to open in the summer of 2012, several months later than the target announced in April 2010 when St. Margaret’s bought the property on the corner of Bienville Street and North Jefferson Davis Parkway.

Jason Hemel, St. Margaret’s vice president for development, confirmed that his organization is in talks with a hospital operator about the yet-undetailed second phase: a small hospital. Addressing the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization this week, Hemel did not disclose the potential operator or the specifics of what kind of hospital or surgical center St. Margaret’s has in mind. He referred mostly to a “specialty hospital” and mentioned “30 to 50 beds,” but he did not explicitly rule out the possibility of a full-service hospital.

It is questionable how a full-service hospital in Mid-City would fit into a hospital market where existing hospitals like Tulane Medical Center and Touro Infirmary, to say nothing of the hundreds of additional beds that would come online with the completion of the planned University Medical Center and an eastern New Orleans hospital on the old Methodist Hospital campus.

Specialty hospitals that target customers for specific, often out-patient procedures – orthopedics, heart catheterizations – are increasingly commonplace in the U.S. health care system.

“In about six to eight months, we should have some more things to announce,” Hemel said.

St. Margaret’s executives have said that the end product would include physician offices, clinic spaces, rehabilitation services and a small surgical hospital, a complex modeled after the organization’s St. Luke’s Medical Center and St. Luke’s Living Center that opened last year in Algiers.

Hemel said St. Margaret’s also is considering a wellness center and is in discussions with a day-care provider for a facility that could serve employees and surrounding community members. “We don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like,” he said.

The demolition work will take about 45 to 60 days as architects finish the final plans for the new nursing home facilities will occupy about 100,000 square feet of what had been medical office buildings at Lindy Boggs. The entire complex is about 300,000 square feet.

Though plans are not final, Hemel said the concept envisions apartment-style rooms clustered in “neighborhoods,” rather than traditional long hallways with single and double rooms on each side. Plans call for 12 neighborhoods each with nine rooms. Each room will have its own kitchen, laundry and dining area.

“We’re trying to make it much more like being in your own home,” Hemel said, adding that St. Margaret’s executives have traveled extensively to see the same model in other cities.

The Lindy Boggs Medical Center, run by for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corp., suffered extensive flood damage from Hurricane Katrina and its levee breaches. The hospital never reopened after the flood.

Tenet sold the property to Victory Real Estate Investments, a Georgia firm that amassed several Mid-City properties with the intention of developing a Bienville retail corridor. That idea never materialized. Public records show that St. Margaret’s acquired the Lindy Boggs complex for $4.2 million.

St. Margaret’s Daughters, constituted in 1889, has been providing institutional health care since it opened a facility in the Holy Cross neighborhood in 1931. The agency’s Lower 9th Ward nursing home flooded during Katrina and has since reopened at 3419 St. Claude Avenue.

Crescent Growth Capital closes books on first calendar year; over $180 million in tax credit financings during the course of 2009

January 28, 2010 by Crescent Growth Capital

Capping off its first calendar year of operations, Crescent Growth Capital closed seven transactions in December 2009, representing $95 million of New Markets Tax Credits financings. These end-of-year transactions, executed on behalf of entities in both Texas and Louisiana, brought CGC’s full-year total to over $180 million of tax credit financings.

“We feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to execute tax credit equity transactions on behalf of so many worthy entities this past year,” remarked Managing Director Eric Finley. “That we’ve been able to decisively contribute to helping realize better health outcomes, improved educational opportunities, and more effective social service delivery says a lot for the skills deployed by my colleagues, our consultants and the other parties to these complicated transactions.”

“Closing New Markets financings requires long-term collaboration across disciplines, and the flexibility to bend first one way, then another in the interests of getting across the finish line,” added Director Ryan Kenter. “Make no mistake, it’s a challenging business – but it’s truly fulfilling work.”

For more information, visit www.crescentgrowthcapital.com

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