The Tulsa County Home Consortium seldom makes headlines. In fact, most people have never heard of it.
But little by little, significantly but silently, it makes a difference in people’s lives by helping them obtain affordable housing.
By this time next year, Sapulpans will see the organization’s work firsthand: The renovation of the Wells Building, in Sapulpa’s historic downtown, into 32 affordable housing units for older people is expected to be completed in December 2011.
“The consortium is very glad to be a partner in that project,” said Claudia Brierre, a community development planner with the Indians Nations Council of Governments.
The consortium, which is operated by INCOG, comprises 24 member jurisdictions in six counties.
Tulsa County is the leading entity. It manages the consortium’s funds, which are provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Brierre and the Well’s Building Apartments projects is the consortium’s 11th affordable housing project for older people but its first one in which a building will be renovated for the purpose.
However, the consortium is not going into the project blind. MetroPlains LLC of St. Paul, Minn. – known nationally for its adaptive reuse of historic buildings – is the developer on the project.
“About half the projects we work on are ones like the Wells Building,” said John Errrigo of MetroPlains.
The company has done about 50 such reuse projects, including three in Oklahoma, Errigo said.
The Oklahoma projects were the Berryhill Building in Sapulpa, which also provides affordable housing for older residents; the Will Rogers Hotel in Claremore; and the Aldridge Hotel in McAlester.
“One of the things that is attractive about Oklahoma in particular is that it has state historic tax credits that help defray the extra costs associated with rehabilitation” of a building, Errigo said.
State and federal historic tax credits will cover $1.6 million of the Wells Building project’s $6 million cost. Other funding will come from American Heritage Bank, the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency and the consortium, which is providing $700,000.
The project makes complete sense to Janet Beil, director of Sapulpa Main Street. Her organization works to spur economic development in the city’s historic downtown by preserving the structures within it.
“We recognize that these sorts of projects have a domino effect where you renovate one building and it causes other people to do the same thing,” she said.
Much work needs to be done before the Well’s Building becomes the Wells Building Apartments.
For starters, construction crews must remove metal and other materials that were placed on the brick structure in the 1960s to give it a more modern look.
The hope then was to keep shoppers downtown by making downtown look more like the shiny new malls that were going outside of town.
“We have some pictures from the 1980s where half of these buildings, at least down here had some sort of façade added to them.” Beil said.
But times change.
“It’s just recently that people are rediscovering how cool these buildings are,” she said.
So when the Wells Building built in 1917 at 208-210 E. Dewey Ave., becomes the Wells Building Apartments, it will have a brick façade.
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