MANSFIELD — There’s a tide turning on the north side of Mansfield.
The city has gone decades without large scale housing development. For nearly a decade, the Richland County Land Bank was tearing down dilapidated homes.
A central Ohio company now wants to build around 70 affordable housing units on more than 60 vacant lots owned by the land bank.
Woda Cooper Companies, an affordable housing development firm based in Columbus, has asked the land bank to sell a package of parcels with addresses on Benton Street, Boughton Avenue, Bowman Street, Cedar Street, Clairmont Avenue, Crystal Springs Street, West Fifth Street, East First Street, Weldon Avenue, Willis Avenue and Wood Street.
That purchase agreement would be contingent on Woda Cooper securing specific funding and tax credits from the state of Ohio to make an affordable housing project financially viable.
The land bank voted earlier this month on a letter of intent to move forward with the purchase agreement.
Amy Hamrick, the land bank’s executive director, said the board will likely vote on a finalized set of terms during a special meeting in the near future.
“Looking at what they’ve done in other communities, I thought it was pretty impressive,” Hamrick said.
But what is Woda Cooper? And would the housing it builds actually be affordable?
Woda Cooper is large; has properties in neighboring communities
Woda Cooper is a vertically-integrated affordable housing firm, meaning the company keeps the process in house through multiple stages — from development and construction to leasing and management.
It’s a large operation, with 375 communities in 19 states, according to its website. Nearly all of them are east of the Mississippi River.
“They’re big. They’ve been doing this for a long, long time and they have properties all over the place,” said Steve Andrews, executive director of the Mansfield Metropolitan Housing Authority.
Locally, Woda Cooper’s housing developments include Wesley Yard in Crestline, Chartwell Greene in Mount Gilead, Lockwood Greene in Loudonville and Montgomery Crossing in Ashland.
“We don’t really have a problem with their properties,” said Derek Allen, Mount Gilead’s village administrator. “They are nice-looking houses. You would not know that it’s some sort of subsidized housing. It looks like a neighborhood.”
Mayor Matt Miller said he spoke with representatives from Woda Cooper two or three times before they purchased 3.1 acres of privately-held land for an apartment complex on Eagle Way in Ashland. But that was several years ago.
“Once they actually closed on the property and moved forward, that has really been the extent of our interaction with them,” Miller said.
Miller said that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When land is purchased from a private owner and a project doesn’t require any tax incentives or zoning variances, developers don’t necessarily need to keep in touch with the mayor’s office.
Miller also said he hasn’t heard any complaints from residents about living conditions or property upkeep.
“If there were issues in terms of (Woda Cooper) maintaining their property, I’m sure I would have heard about that,” he said.
Most of Woda Cooper’s developments have been large, multi-family complexes or subdivisions. Its proposal for Mansfield would look a little different, but it wouldn’t be the first of its kind for the company.
“We have a very, very similar product in Newark, Ohio, where we did a number of lots that were all in the same neighborhood, but not right with each other,” said Jeff Woda, the copmany’s founder and CEO.
“We do think all of the lots that we have under contract have water and sewer right on site. So the site utilities won’t be as challenging as they are in doing a subdivision or building somewhere where something hasn’t been built before. There will be challenges, but there are some advantages,” Woda said.
Its proposal for Mansfield includes a mix of duplexes, single-family homes and possibly triplexes.
“We do have a great, great track record of residents that really never leave our single-family houses,” Woda said. “We’ve had residents that have been there 15-plus years.”
Company was early adopter of Reagan-era affordable housing tax credits
Woda Cooper got its start as Woda Construction and Development, founded by Jeff Woda in 1990. David Cooper Jr., the company’s legal counsel, joined the company full time in 2003.
Together, the two men saw an opportunity to leverage federal tax credits to build much-needed affordable housing.
Today, Woda Cooper Companies is one of several developers whose business model relies heavily on these Low Income Housing Tax Credits. LIHTC was created as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and signed into law by then-President Ronald Reagan.
“We started our company in 1990. The credit was way under-subscribed at that time. No developers had really figured it out,” said Woda.
“My business partner is a tax attorney. I’m a CPA who grew up in the residential building business, so it made perfect sense to us,” he added. “We decided to build a business centered around using that credit.”
Developers like Woda Cooper apply for LIHTCs to offset the cost of developing rental housing. In exchange, they are required to keep rents affordable for a certain period of time — typically a minimum of 15 years.
“It was an idea that you would build this public-private partnership to create affordable rental housing that would have the same quality as market-rate housing, but target an audience for those that are the workforce of America and seniors on fixed incomes,” Woda said.
Typically, developers apply for the credits, then sell them to banks and use the capital to finance their projects on the front end.
How do LIHTC developers define affordable?
When developers get a LIHTC credit, they are required to keep housing affordable. But “affordable” isn’t a relative term dictated by the developer or market conditions. It’s based on the income of people living where the housing is built.
For its Mansfield project, rents would range from $875 to $1,050, according to the company’s proposal. Units would be restricted to residents earning between 50 and 70 percent of the area median income.
Woda said there are a lot of misconceptions about affordable housing and the people who live there.
“I heard the mayor of a suburb of Columbus describe it once and I thought he used a wonderful example. The same people that work for the daycare that you take your children to, those are the same people living in our affordable housing units,” he said.
“You trust them with your children all day. You can trust them to be your neighbors as well.
“People that work for the school district, people that work for the hospital and in healthcare — it’s really all of those service workers that really struggle to find somewhere that’s not only affordable in rent, but also in utilities,” Woda said.
Woda says Mansfield properties would have local maintenance
Both Woda and other developers familiar with the company said Woda Cooper’s model relies on scaling its operations for efficiency.
“They’ve got a good reputation. They’re big. They have sort of a machine working,” Andrews said. “They get a lot of stuff done and it gets done well and the properties stay nice.”
Woda said the company builds a quality product with long-term ownership in mind.
“We’re going to be the same people that pitch it to a community that also property manage it. So if you have an issue down the road, you’re calling the same people. It’s not absentee landlords. It’s those that invested in the community originally,” he said.
“We also think the vertical integration — being the same people that are developing it and building it and property managing it — makes a lot of sense because we have our property managers right there with our developers and contractors working to build the best product possible to stand that test of time rather than a construction company that’s in a silo trying to maximize its profits,” he added.
If Woda Cooper secures a LIHTC credit and builds its proposed housing in Mansfield, Woda said the company would employ an onsite service tech in town for light maintenance and rely on local contractors for more complex repairs like plumbing, HVAC and electrical.
A regional manager would oversee the Mansfield service tech and those in surrounding Woda Cooper-owned developments, he added.
Woda emphasized that his copmnay would not be an absentee landlord.
“We have an email address and phone numbers with 24-hour answering,” he said. “Our site manager and service tech are both equipped with cell phones.”
As with any new development, Woda Cooper’s plans would need to be approved by city government and abide by local zoning regulations.
