Land trust plan on Brown up for vote

Evanston's City Council is scheduled Monday to vote to spend $350,000 to buy land on Brown Avenue from the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church for redevelopment as affordable housing.

As previously proposed to the council in June , the city would then donate the land at 1825-1831 Brown Ave. to Community Partners for Affordable Housing, which has submitted a preliminary plan to redevelop the parcel with nine affordable housing units.

The money to purchase the property would come from Northwestern University's first-year contribution of $1 million to the city's affordable housing fund.

CPAH's proposal projects that the project could be completed for a total of $4 million.

It proposes, after demolishing the existing dilapidated single family home on the site, constructing three two-unit condominium buildings plus three accessory dwelling units.

Each condo unit is proposed to be 1,200 square feet in size. Adding common areas, the total floor plate of each condo building could be as much as 1,472 square feet.

The size of the one- or two-bedroom ADUs is not specified in the proposal. But assuming they were 800 square feet each, the total cost per square foot for the proposed $4 million project is projected to be around $356.

A price of $4 million to build nine total units would work out to a cost per unit of just over $444,000.

By comparison, the 33-unit subsidized rental development approved by the City Council last year at 1811-1815 Church St. had a cost per unit, at the time it was approved, of nearly $660,000 .

That project, which was reduced from 44 to 33 units in the face of opposition from neighbors at essentially no reduction in the total construction cost, has been tied up since by a lawsuit brought by a neighboring property owner.

CPAH President Rob Anthony's proposal says the six three-bedroom, two-bathroom condos would be placed in a land trust and be sold for about $200,000 to households earning less than 80% of area median income.

Anthony says that's less than half the lowest current listing price for a three-bedroom condo unit in Evanston.

Under the land trust model, the buyers would be limited in the profit they could make on resale in an effort to assure that the units remained affordable in perpetuity.

Anthony says the three accessory dwelling units would be owned by CPAH and leased to households making less than 60% of area median income.

Anthony's proposal assumes a $4 million total project cost — but that assumes purchasing the property for $200,000, rather than the $350,000 the city has agreed to pay the church.

It also assumes a total contribution of $1.6 million in funds from the city, $1.2 million from sale of the condos to the buyers, and $1.2 million from Illinois Affordable Housing Tax Credits and Illinois Housing Development Authority trust funds.

The property is currently zoned R3, which calls for a minimum of 3,500 square feet of land for each unit in a two-unit building and 5,000 square feet for a single family dwelling.

Therefore, under the zoning code, only one two-unit condo building and one single family home (plus two ADUs) could be built as of right on the roughly 12,000 square foot parcel, so zoning variations would be required to permit the density called for by CPAH's proposal.

An 86-page report from an appraiser hired by the city concludes that the parcel with the existing home is worth $205,000 and that the vacant remainder of the land is worth $195,000.

The report notes that several vacant parcels sold over the past few years in the neighborhood have yet to see any development activity.