photo by: Courtesy: LDCHA/Hernly Associates Inc.

The rendering shows a preliminary design for a new low-income, senior housing project near Clinton Parkway and Iowa Street. The 32-unit apartment project is being planned by the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority.

An apartment complex for low-income seniors is in the works near Clinton Parkway and Iowa Street, thanks to what is expected to be an influx of affordable housing funds from the federal government.

The Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority has filed plans at City Hall that will allow it to expand its existing Clinton Place apartment complex, 2125 Clinton Parkway, by 32 apartments. All of the apartments will be one-bedroom units, and all of them will be reserved for low-income people who are 55 or older.

The project is expected to cost around $5 million, Shannon Oury, executive director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority, told me. That funding isn’t yet in hand, but the authority has filed for the necessary rezoning to build the project anyway. That’s because, for once, figuring out how to get the money may not be the toughest task for an affordable housing project. Being ready to spend it might be.

“There is a lot of money being put out there for affordable housing, so we want to be in a position to move forward as soon as it comes out,” Oury said.

Affordable housing money was available in the American Rescue Plan Act that was approved in March, and Douglas County commissioners have yet to allocate all the funding the county received as part of that $1.9 trillion federal bill. But beyond that, the recently approved Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal also will have funding for affordable housing, Oury said.

The Clinton Place plans call for an entirely new building to be constructed between the existing 58-unit apartment complex and Clinton Parkway. Since the housing authority already owns the land, Oury estimates it can complete the project for about a third less than if it had to go out and purchase property and build from scratch.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

The Clinton Place apartments, 2125 Clinton Parkway, are pictured on Nov. 29, 2021. The Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority plans to expand the complex to serve more low income seniors.

The housing authority purchased the Clinton Place apartments in 2006, when the complex was going through foreclosure. The authority did about $1 million worth of renovation work, and the complex has basically been fully occupied with low-income seniors ever since, Oury said.

But the need for more affordable housing units continues. Oury said the authority has a waiting list of about 450 people who are seeking affordable housing units in the county. Not all of them are seniors, but Oury estimated about one-third of everybody the authority serves is a senior.

The new units will be rent-controlled. Oury said she expected the units to be filled by people who make no more than 30% of the area’s median income. All rents will be capped at 30% of a household’s income. For example, a one-person household in Lawrence making about $18,000 a year would meet the low-income standard. That person then would pay about $450 a month in rent and utilities under the sliding-scale system.

While the Clinton Place expansion is interesting in itself, it also is interesting to think of whether there are other Clinton Places out there. In other words, are there other old apartment complexes that could be purchased by the authority and turned into affordable housing?

Oury said the Clinton Place project has worked well enough that she’s interested in seeing if the model could work again at a different apartment complex.

“I definitely think so,” Oury said of possible conversions of apartment complexes into affordable housing projects.

If that’s the case, it could help answer what seems to be a potentially tough long-term question for Lawrence: What do you do with old apartment complexes? As many residents have noticed, there has been a lot of new apartment construction in Lawrence over the last decade. It generated a frequent question: Where are all the people coming from?

But that is not really how the apartment industry works. You don’t need new people to build a new apartment complex. You just need the confidence that your new apartment complex will take renters from an older apartment complex. But if those older apartment complexes don’t attract new tenants, they easily can fall into disrepair and become a blight issue in the community.

It is an issue that hasn’t been lost on those in the affordable housing industry.

“There have been conversations about apartment complexes,” Oury said. “There is a group talking about what is out there and what is possible. I think there will be a lot of projects in the future where people are trying to get creative.”

How creative will be interesting to watch. As far as I know, nobody is talking about saving Oliver Hall — the University of Kansas dormitory that once housed 600 students at 19th and Naismith — from demolition next year by converting it into a communitywide affordable housing complex. Even with relatively easy access to federal money, that probably would still be a pretty difficult project.

But there are plenty of other more traditional apartment complexes that might come on the market, depending on whether their owners are looking to cash out or if occupancy rates are really struggling.

Could the housing authority pay something close to market rates for old apartment complexes and still make an affordable housing project pencil out? Or, like in the case of Clinton Place, would it only work if they were buying complexes at foreclosure prices?

Oury and I didn’t dive that deeply into the subject, but she did say she was pleased with the ownership program the housing authority currently has. It goes well beyond Clinton Place. The authority now owns a little more than 450 living units across the county. It has its own maintenance crew to work on the apartments and has discovered several other efficiencies of scale.

But most of all, it is carrying less debt on those projects than many apartment complexes in the area. That, combined with its nonprofit status, gives it a chance to tackle the affordable housing issue in ways that others can’t.

“It is very tricky for landlords because they have a different model than we do,” Oury said. “We are in a unique position to do affordable housing.”