HAND’s Housing Achievement Awards recognize the most outstanding and innovative housing developments, programs and solutions across the metropolitan region. On June 11th, the 2013 award winners will be honored formally at HAND’s 22nd Annual Meeting & Housing Expo. However, we thought we’d offer you a sneak peek into the nine award winners and how they are prime examples of Collaboration, Innovation and Transformation. Keep reading below to learn more about the individuals and organizations who are building strong communities across the metropolitan region.
AHC Inc. is a nonprofit developer of affordable housing that provides quality homes and education programs for low- and moderate-income families in the mid-Atlantic region. Based in Arlington, VA, AHC has developed more than 5,300 apartment units in 39 properties in Virginia and Maryland since 1975. AHC also offers a variety of services to help families thrive and succeed. AHC’s Resident Services program, which reaches more than 2,000 individuals each year, received HAND’s Best Community Life Program award in 2010. AHC also provides home ownership and home improvement programs to families and individuals with limited incomes. In 2012, AHC initiated, preserved or opened five affordable housing projects, providing nearly 1,200 new or renovated apartments to the mid-Atlantic region. Located in four different jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia, the projects represent a wide spectrum of development strategies, including creative site assembly, timely preservation of at-risk apartments, neighborhood revitalization, and innovative financing. Congratulations AHC!
Monarch Mills is a new 269 unit mixed-income, multi-generational, amenity rich, sustainably designed community in Columbia, Maryland. The units are all distributed amongst 10 craftsman-style inspired garden rental buildings. They are organized around a large common green, segregating vehicular and pedestrian circulation. A continuous pedestrian path links all of the buildings and site amenities such that residents on foot need never cross the path of a car. Monarch Mills is an example of an affordable, quality and sustainable mixed-income community in which market rate and affordable units are indistinguishable and therefore interchangeable. The community is owned by Howard County Housing and was developed in partnership with Shelter Development, LLC. Congratulations Monarch Mills!
Founded in 1950, 1415 Girard Street Cooperative has a rich history as the first African American cooperative in DC, and has become a staple of the Columbia Heights community. Faced with numerous vacant units in need of repair and negative cash flow, the cooperative looked to City First for help. City First worked with the cooperative’s leadership team to refinance, renovate, and reposition the building to ensure a sustainably successful future. The partnership with City First likely saved the cooperative from bankruptcy or sale, which in either case would have displaced the current resident owners and lost a long-term affordable property to the market. Congratulations to Girard Street Cooperative and City First Homes!
Founded in 1988, FACETS is a well-established nonprofit organization that touches and improves the lives of thousands of families and individuals every year. FACETS open doors by helping people meet their emergency shelter, food, and medical needs, helping them gain safe, sustainable and permanent housing and working with them to end the cycle of poverty through educational, life skills and career counseling programs. FACETS’ ECD staff also work with families in these communities to help facilitate their ability to increase income and eventually to move into market-rate housing. Congratulations FACETS!
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