Rolling Hills Apartments, St. Paul, Minnesota

OVERVIEW

“Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here,” says Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation). Minneapolis-St. Paul has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees from around the world and is home to many organizations serving these populations. St. Paul’s East Side, where LISC has worked for years, is home to a rich cultural mix of immigrants including Hmong, Somali, Karin, Bhutanese, Sudanese, Latinos and others, alongside Native and African Americans.

“Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here.”

“It is a hard to reach population,” says Amy Gillman at the LISC national office. These are “highly impoverished and culturally diverse residents, who face significant barriers to physical and social activities related to health.” To make matters worse, the city is experiencing a major housing crunch with high rents and low vacancy rates, and yet, perversely, the East Side also has numerous abandoned homes and businesses that are fallout from the 2008 mortgage crisis. High-quality affordable housing is a critical need in East Side St. Paul, a need that renovating the Rolling Hills Apartments is helping to fill.

In the neighborhood that surrounds the Rolling Hills Apartments, a multifaceted (and, in the past, not always well-coordinated) community revitalization effort has been underway for over a decade, aimed at improving health, livability, income, and wealth. It includes collaboration among several small, culturally specific economic development associations (e.g., Latino, Hmong), urban farming and market efforts, youth and jobs services and programs, financial asset-building services, and other programs. Twin Cities LISC has been investing in East Side St. Paul since the late 1980’s, and recently supported the expansion of Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) West Side Community Health Services to create a spacious new East Side facility, with the help of New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC).

The Rolling Hills Apartments, a once-rundown complex of two- and three-story walkups owned by for-profit developers Clint Blaiser and Richard Pakonen, had been serving as de facto affordable housing — the low rents at the apartment complex meant that the city and local church groups frequently placed newly arrived immigrants and refugees here, initially subsidizing their rent.

Converting Rolling Hills into official affordable housing gave access to new kinds of funding and the chance to overhaul this “housing of last resort” while adding space for community activities and health and refugee services.

In 2012, Lutheran Social Services (LSS) and Blaiser and Pakonen partnered to renovate the apartment complex and convert it into official affordable housing. Doing so opened up access to new kinds of funding, creating the opportunity to overhaul this “housing of last resort” while adding space for community-building activities and for health and refugee services that now serve Rolling Hills Apartments residents and the East Side neighborhood. The project was awarded Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) from the city of St. Paul. The partners were able to combine LSS social service provision with Blaiser and Pakonen’s development expertise, and to use tax credits to maintain affordable rents. They worked with the FQHC and Twin Cities LISC to add the onsite clinic exam room, and LISC also made it possible to add a community meeting room and community gardens, as well as support for programming and resident activities. Twin Cities LISC provided the technical support to arrange the financing. Formalized as a Limited Partnership (RH-St. Paul Apartments LP), LSS and Blaiser and Pakonen co-own the newly renovated complex.