Bay Area Transportation Commission Creates Affordable Housing Fund

Oakland, Calif.–The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Oakland-based transportation planning and funding agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, has just established a new $50 million revolving loan fund for affordable housing developers. The Bay Area Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund, part of MTC’s Transportation for Livable Communities program, is designed to assist developers with the financing of land acquisitions for transit-oriented projects. An affordable housing complex in San Francisco by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. (TNDC) will be one of the first projects to benefit from the new fund.

Managed by the Low Income Investment Fund, the Bay Area Affordable Transit Oriented Housing Fund’s list of investors includes Morgan Stanley and Citi Community Capital, each of which contributed $12.5 million, as well as the Ford Foundation and Living Cities, which contributed $3 million each. Additionally, six community development and financial institutions provided an aggregate $8.5 million, and the San Francisco Foundation supplied $500,000 in addition to seed funding to facilitate the fund’s business plan.

MTC will kick off the fund with its recently approved $10 million anchor commitment, and TNDC will receive $4.8 million of that sum to develop the Eddy & Taylor Family Housing project, a 150-unit high-rise that will include 30 units for homeless families. The funding allows the development company to move forward with the project, which had been delayed due to lack of financing. “It’s been on hold for a while, partially due to a significant gap in financing that we needed to proceed with other financing applications with the State of California,” Nick Griffin, senior project manager with TNDC, tells MHN. “And there was a central freeze of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit market, but we hadn’t even gotten to that point.”

In addition to the Eddy & Taylor apartment community’s one-, two- and three-bedroom residences, the 14-story building will feature ground-level retail space that will house the Tenderloin neighborhood’s first full-service grocery store. The tower will sprout up on a half-acre site that is presently home to a parking lot.

“The next step for the project involves our continued conversations with the City about its ability to provide financing,” Griffin says. “We’re also exploring different avenues with private developers that have to meet onsite inclusionary-unit requirements as part of the zoning regulations.”