Historic Tax Credits

Tulane University – Devlin Fieldhouse

October 15, 2014 by

Constructed in 1933, partially with funds earned by Tulane University’s football team in its 1932 appearance in the Rose Bowl, Devlin Fieldhouse is the 9th-oldest continuously active basketball venue in the United States. In 2012, Crescent Growth Capital was hired to supervise the state historic tax credit application and monetization process for the fieldhouse’s $5 million historic rehabilitation.

CGC authored two sets of historic preservation certification applications for the two-phase project, translating architect Gould Evans’ design into an easily-comprehensible narrative resulting in no conditions attached to the Part 2 approvals issued by the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation.

The rehabilitated fieldhouse retains the original’s fine Art Deco exterior while re-exposing the steel trusses and redwood ceiling decking formerly obscured by a drop ceiling installed in an earlier renovation. The entrance lobby and common areas were recast according to a more spacious design prescribing clean lines and a dark color palette. Additional work was accomplished renovating and expanding public restrooms and locker rooms.

New Orleans Military & Maritime Academy

October 3, 2014 by

Inspired by the acclaimed military academy model employed by the Noble Street Charter School in Chicago, the New Orleans Military and Maritime Academy (“NOMMA”) opened its doors in August 2011. Requiring that all its student-cadets enroll in an on-campus Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (MJROTC) unit, NOMMA accepts all students who have passed Louisiana’s 8th Grade high-stakes LEAP test. Students defined by the state as “at-risk” are particularly sought. School leaders believe that NOMMA’s emphasis on self-discipline and “moral literacy” coupled with a “standards-based” curriculum that clearly defines academic and behavioral expectations, creates a uniquely potent platform to inculcate good habits in today’s youth.

The charter school opened in a temporary facility, a former public elementary school dating to the 1950s, but from the beginning its leaders envisioned moving to a permanent home. A plan was devised to rehabilitate historic Buildings 16 & 71 in Federal City, a former naval base, and link them with new construction to produce an 85,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art school campus.

Click this link to watch a short video on the school: Community Impact: NOMMA

In October 2012, Crescent Growth Capital helped NOMMA close on a $17.9 million aggregate QEI with Dudley Ventures and SECDE Ventures, leveraging CDBG proceeds and Qualified Zone Academy and Qualified School Construction Bonds (“QZABs” and “QSCBs”) to help fund the $18.4 million construction budget. The closing was a massive undertaking, requiring a team effort from a number of parties, including Iberia Bank, the New Orleans Federal Alliance, the Algiers Development District, the U.S. Marine Corps and the Louisiana Office of Community Development.

Simultaneously, CGC authored sets of federal and state historic preservation certification applications for Buildings 16 and 71, mediated between project architects and the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, and aided in the creation of a new National Register Historic District: the U.S. Naval Station Algiers Historic District, which came into being on September 11, 2013. In 2014, the historic tax credit application and financing process was closed out, with NOMMA having incurred $10 million in Qualified Rehabilitation Expenses. This QRE total generated over $4.5 million in federal and state historic tax credit equity for the school.

For more information on the school, please visit their website.

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts

December 19, 2013 by

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts is a regional, pre-professional arts training center that offers students intensive instruction in culinary arts, dance, media arts: filmmaking & audio production, music (classical, jazz, vocal), theatre arts (drama, musical theatre, theatre design), visual arts, and creative writing, while demanding simultaneous academic excellence.

NOCCA was founded in 1973 by a diverse coalition of artists, educators, business leaders, and community activists who saw the need for an institution devoted to our region’s burgeoning young talent. Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Harry Connick, Jr., Terence Blanchard, Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet, Wendell Pierce, Anthony Mackie, Mary Catherine Garrison and Gary Solomon Jr. are only a few NOCCA graduates who can attest to the extraordinary educational opportunity the Center represents to the children of Louisiana.

NOCCA was operated for its first quarter-century by the Orleans Parish School Board; students were required to be residents of New Orleans. In 2000, the school relocated to its present campus, on the banks of the Mississippi River in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, and its governance was revised to provide for direct administration by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. At this time NOCCA began accepting students residing anywhere in Louisiana, in service of its broadened role as the premier performing and visual arts high school for the state.

In the ensuing years, NOCCA’s curriculum matured to encompass concentrations in eleven disciplines, including jazz, classical instrumental music, drama and the visual arts. The events of 2005 tested the institution, scattering its faculty and student body across the country, but NOCCA’s stakeholders responded by embracing a bold plan for growth.

Additional concentrations, in the digital media and culinary arts were launched, and, in 2011, a longstanding dream to offer at NOCCA a full school day of instruction came to fruition with the debut of the Academic Studio. For the first time, curricula in math, science and the humanities were taught on campus, making it possible for NOCCA students to acquire an innovative, fully comprehensive, arts-centered secondary education without having to leave the site. NOCCA’s progress has come in the face of ten budget cuts, some occurring mid-year, over the last four years; the school’s state funding has decreased by 25% during this period.

Responding to these challenges with characteristic boldness, the NOCCA Institute – NOCCA’s community support and advocacy organization – developed a plan for the NOCCA Forum, a dramatic $26.4MM proposal to lay the foundation for the school’s future. The Forum will incorporate cutting-edge facilities and include revenue-generating elements to provide independent means to the institution’s endeavors. In early 2013, NOCCA contacted Crescent Growth Capital (“CGC”) to assist them in bringing together financing for the Forum.

On December 19th, 2013, CGC helped NOCCA close and fund a $12.5MM Qualified Equity Investment (“QEI”), using New Markets Tax Credits allocations of $6.5MM and $6MM provided by First NBC Bank and Whitney Bank, respectively, and leveraging an estimated $7.8MM in Federal and State Historic Tax Credit equity, and $14MM of Qualified Zone Academy Bonds (“QZABs”). The Federal and State New Markets and Historic Tax Credit equity, combined with $14MM of QZABs provided the NOCCA Institute with nearly $12.5MM in combined subsidy, which amounts to nearly half of the project budget.

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.

Carver Theater

November 15, 2012 by

For 200 years, the Iberville-Treme neighborhood was home to New Orleans’ gens de couleur libres – “free people of color” – who were not enslaved before the Civil War. Despite sustained disinvestment, mounting crime, and the flight of its middle class to newly-desegregated neighborhoods, this community of free African Americans, the largest in the nation by the mid-19th century, provided a unique foundation for transformative artistic endeavor, most notably birthing jazz music.

Still a vital community in the mid-20th century, Iberville-Treme received its last private performing arts investment with the opening of the Carver Theater in 1950. Named after the famous African-American scientist George Washington Carver, the theater offered a state-of-the-art, non-segregated facility in which black New Orleanians could enjoy the latest Hollywood offerings from main-floor seating. By 1965 the end of Jim Crow laws made it possible for African Americans to sit with white audiences; they were no longer relegated to the balcony. Marooned within a deteriorating neighborhood, the Carver Theater closed for good in 1980.

In mid-2011, Crescent Growth Capital (“CGC”) began working with the Carver Theater to develop a plan that would rehabilitate the facility, create 133 permanent jobs and reinstate the artistic and cultural anchor of the neighborhood. In November, 2012, CGC helped the Carver Theater, First NBC Bank and the Louisiana Office of Community Development (“OCD”) close and fund a $5.5 million Qualified Equity Investment and a $2.25 million OCD Loan to finance the $9.7 million rehabilitation.

The new Carver Theater will provide badly-needed employment opportunities for the surrounding highly-distressed low-income community. The Carver will support 133 non-construction jobs, most of which will not require advanced degrees or special competencies. The positions are entry-level; the required skills will be learned on the job. Moreover, the theater is prominently situated in the center of the Iberville-Treme neighborhood – one of the most artistically fertile neighborhoods in the United States. Giving this neighborhood a platform for formal artistic expression is of inestimable value.

Furthermore, the Carver Theater’s sponsors will provide programming in support of this mission. Adjacent on-site facilities will house the Edward “Kidd” Jordan Jazz Institute. The institute will offer instruction in music performance, composition, and production. Dr. Henry Panion, a classical conductor and music arranger for Stevie Wonder, will collaborate with the institute on his new initiative, Gospel Goes Classical, providing the Carver with a prominent anchor production at the outset.

Finally, as a consequence of its use of historic tax credit equity, the Mid-Century Modern Carver Theater will be restored according to the exacting Standards for Rehabilitation promulgated by the United States Department of the Interior. The Carver’s redesign has received Historic Preservation Certifications from the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation and the National Park Service.

Daughters of Charity Health Centers

December 30, 2011 by

With so many of the working poor lacking health insurance, supporting the provision of means-tested primary care translates into both socioeconomic advancement and the proactive management of chronic conditions before they produce real disability. Though the passage of healthcare reform should dramatically reduce the number of uninsured Americans, at last resulting in insurance coverage for the working poor, adequate access to primary care constitutes the next challenge confronting residents of low-income communities.

Crescent Growth Capital helped address the issue of access by structuring and closing in September and December 2009 two New Markets Tax Credit qualified equity investments totaling $13.5 million on behalf of Daughters of Charity Health Services of New Orleans. Operated according to the best practices “medical home” healthcare delivery model – where teams of nurses, physician assistants and doctors collaborate to deliver for patients coordinated, comprehensive treatment regimes – the two new health clinics financed in the transaction annually accommodate tens of thousands of additional primary care visits. The majority of the clinics’ clientele come from minority populations, and approximately 80% of patients are without health insurance. Fees are charged on a sliding scale, according to payment ability. Thanks to the new clinics, countless minor illnesses are being addressed prior to metastasizing, and many additional chronic conditions are being successfully managed. A significant and measurable improvement in community health is underway.

Crescent Growth Capital also secured valuable additional project funding by preparing and submitting Historic Preservation Certification Applications (Parts 1, 2 & 3), taking advantage of Daughters of Charity’s rehabilitation of the historic former St. Cecilia Elementary School. CGC solicited tax credit investor proposals and advised DCSNO through financial closing to generate an additional $1 million in gross tax credit equity, derived from the successful classification of over $4 million as Qualified Rehabilitation Expenses. Financial closing for this state historic tax credit transaction occurred in December of 2011.

Historic Tax Credits

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