The city’s first “open plan” subdivision of affordable homes broke ground Monday, Jan. 30, on a cold and frosty lot on Richmond Avenue in South Memphis.

The Lincoln Park groundbreaking, hosted by project developer The Works Inc., was set against the backdrop of the death of Tyre Nichols as well as other efforts to bring more affordable housing to the city.

“Let’s be honest. It’s been a hard few days for our community. And it’s hard to get up this morning,” Paul Morris, The Works’ board chair, told a group of about 50 huddled around a small tent on the field where Lincoln Junior High School once stood.

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“But I look at this open field and think about what is about to be here — 30 families are going to be living here — 30 families who are going to help make this community better,” he said.

Lincoln Park will be a set of 14 single-family units and eight duplexes to be sold to low- and moderate-income families.

“It’s ultimately a small lot — 5.2 acres,” The Works president and CEO Roshun Austin told The Daily Memphian after the groundbreaking.

“They have shared common space in the back,” she said of the “open plan” concept. “So they face out to the street but there is a shared concept that encourages community space in the back of their homes.”

It is the latest affordable housing effort The Works Inc. has unveiled recently including:

• The Peachtree senior development, a renovation of an existing apartment complex near Renaissance at Steele, an earlier apartment rehab by The Works.
• The $72 million mixed-use remake of the old Northside High School building in Klondike.
• And a larger remake of single-family homes in the surrounding Klondike neighborhood that recently became a Tax-Increment-Financing district.

“This took a lot of time,” Austin said of the plans for Lincoln Park, starting with securing the land from Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

“And then we had to find some subsidies, because in affordable housing, in order to keep the rents and the mortgages low enough for the homeowners and renters to be able to afford them, we have to have subsidies,” she said. “We have to identify our funding source through the City of Memphis. We have to go through that process.”

The idea for the subdivision began taking shape a decade ago.

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The funding for Lincoln Park from the city’s Housing and Community Development division is joined with construction financing from Patriot Bank, which has worked with The Works on other projects.

Among those in the tent Monday were leaders of the surrounding neighborhood association who Austin said originally questions and concerns about the development’s impacts. Those discussions brought the neighborhood group around to supporting Lincoln Park, she said.

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Concerns about the impact of bringing some scale to affordable housing — rental and ownership — have become more vocal as The Works and other organizations build momentum and move beyond isolated homes or apartments.

Shelby County Commissioner Britney Thornton is questioning the policies of the Shelby County Land Bank. She’s specifically looking into how it transfers tax-delinquent properties to nonprofits, which then team with developers to either rehab homes or build new ones.

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The parcels are often in blighted neighborhoods.

The commission recently approved Thornton’s resolution staying for three months any further transfers of county-owned, tax-delinquent land.

“After we finish this 90 days, I actually want to move into a conversation around emerging developers and just what does it look like for us to actually invest funds into activating the land that people own,” Thornton said on The Daily Memphian’s “On The Record” podcast.

You can listen to the entire interview via the audio link in this article.

“There’s property that is not being fully utilized that is entangled with nonprofit leaders,” she said. “I’m not of the opinion that just shipping our inventory to nonprofits is the exact solution.”

The Works is a nonprofit that has grown in its 30 years to include Neighborhood Preservation Inc.

Austin says it takes time for those organizations to grow.

“When we started out, of course, we probably couldn’t have done something like this because the organization didn’t have the capacity financially,” she said.

Thornton said she’s not opposed to nonprofits getting parcels through the Land Bank.

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“But if giving it to a nonprofit means that it’s going to take away from an individual operator who could actually get it to its best use, then I’m all for us saying that the nonprofit conveyance was not the best route,” she said. “And that the local neighborhood person doing their plan is the best for the community.”

The Klondike TIF drew opposition from a homeowner in the subdivision who managed to delay county commission approval in December by raising the spectre of out-of-town developers or unknown developers.

The “Klondike Partnership,” which includes The Works, controls 400 of 1,300 real estate parcels in Klondike. Austin has said the control is what allows the effort to keep prices affordable for existing homeowners and renters so they aren’t displaced with the market-rate development that is expected to follow.

The commission ultimately approved the TIF, with Thornton being the only ‘no’ vote.

“What I’m going to be pushing for is that neighborhoods should be able to dictate how their land is acquired,” Thornton said. “Of course, the private market will allow whatever an out-of-town investor wants to do. … And so there would still be the general market that people can engage in.”

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The Works Inc. was founded by Dr. Kenneth Robinson, during his 25-year tenure as pastor of St. Andrew AME Church, just a few blocks south of the Lincoln Park site.

Robinson, who is now president and CEO of United Way of the Mid-South, said the impetus was the lack of new housing stock in the area.

“We started modestly as a community housing development organization and had three single-family houses,” he told those at the groundbreaking. That grew to 80 apartment units and 34 single-family homes.

The organization’s motto comes from the Old Testament book of Isaiah that speaks of building up “the ancient ruins.”

“Communities that have suffered disinvestment for generations, housing that has crumbled for generations,” Robinson said, putting the Scripture in a modern context. “Communities that have really had no one else to invest in them for generations – they will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated.”

Roshun Austin, who leads The Works Inc., is a board member of Memphis Fourth Estate Inc., the nonprofit that owns and oversees The Daily Memphian. She did not participate in the writing or editing of this story.