New Hope Housing Inc.

This not for profit organization provides permanent rental accommodation for rehabilitated homeless and destitute individuals. They do not have any debt on their properties, building in a certain robustness and immunity to market conditions, a key to their ability to provide their service in good times and bad.

Click the video to view images


Brays Crossing
The Project at Brays Crossing, owned and operated by New Hope is one such facility.

The site is located along a major highway, Gulf Freeway, and violates one of their rules. They typically look for cheap land, but in this case ended up paying more for it than they would have liked. The city asked them to rehabilitate the existing property that was in a state of disrepair and had passed its valuable economic life. However the owner ended up getting a better deal than they would have liked, but with some assistance from the city, it went ahead anyway.

The site was extremely dangerous with violent crime, drug abuse and trafficking occurring on the property.

Originally the property was used by NASA while the Johnson space center was being constructed. This private use, without handicap access has created some interesting changes to the different levels of the property. There where steps coming down from each room to a lower passage way, forcing New Hope to entertain a large cost to raise a new deck, essentially making the entire site one level.

Another challenge was the creation of a sound-wall to separate the property from the traffic on the freeway. This serves a dual function as a security control device as well. An artistic theme has also been applied to it for aesthetic purposes.

They have $6.1m in low income housing tax credits on the property. National equity fund syndicated the credits to Chase on behalf of New Hope. Many private donors have made up the shortfall in financing the rest of the $11m project.


Criminal Background Check
They do a criminal background check on everyone who comes to rent from the property, including, no arsonists, no drug trafficking, no sex offenders or violent ex-criminals are allowed to rent and live in the property.

Lease Terms
The average rental term is 27 months, with a 6 month initial agreement and monthly rates thereafter. Longer terms will be entertained if a tenant requests it. Their tenants typically do not give notice when they leave and New Hope has made the decision not to go after them for non payment as they feel it would not be worth the time spent. They have never kicked a tenant out for an inability to pay rent, but rather for other more serious reasons, of which an inability to pay rent is a symptom.

Hospice service are provided from an off site company.

CHDCO
The Community Housing Development Corp that they have is an entity registered with the Federal Government to accept funds from their home partnership investment program. This money is repaid with interest.

2821 Canal Street

This property is also under the New Hope umbrella, and has been operated for 5 years. Its design is more open, and was another redevelopment that they undertook. It has an award winning Japanese garden in the internal space that was donated to the project. Many of the decisions made regarding this site where done with regard to the future. For instance, the windows facing the neighboring property are fire glass, which was more expensive than simply building a wall between the properties, but Joy felt that there may be a chance to purchase that property in the future.

Joy, the manager of New Hope mentioned that they are currently doing around 3 project like these per year, depending on the availability of Federal financing and the turn around times of the projects. They have built 1200 housing units in Houston to date, and have plans to continue toward the 8000 units identified as necessary by a recent study.