Iowa City is set to repurpose the former Roosevelt Elementary School into a nearly 10-acre, 187-unit affordable housing complex called Roosevelt Ridge.

The decision comes after Iowa City City Council members unanimously voted on Sept. 2 to rezone the property into a Medium Density Multi-Family Residential Zone.

The developer of the site is the Indiana-based Together We Grow Development, hoping to repurpose the abandoned school into a 187-unit affordable housing complex named Roosevelt Ridge.

For housing to be considered affordable by the state, low or moderate-income households spend no more than 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgage and utilities, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Roosevelt Elementary School opened in 1931, and in 2011, the school closed due to declining enrollment, leaving the building vacant for 13 years. In 2021, the Iowa City Community School District sold the property to Together We Grow Development for $1.25 million. 

No definitive timeline has been placed on the construction of the affordable housing units by the development

In the meantime, Mayor Bruce Teague believes the city council’s rezoning is necessary to open the door for the development to integrate its project into the city. 

“The former Roosevelt Elementary School site was previously zoned public for governmental use,” he said in a statement to The Daily Iowan. “A rezoning was necessary to reflect that ICCSD no longer owns the site, and has been acquired by a private company.”

Teague most notably supports the class of tax credit Together We Grow is attempting to secure — a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit award from the state of Iowa. If awarded, the tax credits will ensure a rent-controlled living environment that will benefit many moderate-income individuals and households.

Iowa City City Councilor Megan Alter said she believes Together We Grow is pursuing the award shows a serious level of commitment to the affordable housing model.

“We have been burned in the past from thinking that [developer projects] would be affordable housing, and then we had student housing created,” she said. “So I am pleased that they are applying for [the award].”

Alter also said officials are pleased with the location of the affordable housing site. 

“We’re committed to infill, which is building within neighborhoods when possible, rather than creating more sprawl,” she said. 

Anne Russett, senior planner of the Iowa City Planning & Zoning Commission, heard the sentiments from residents when the school closed in 2011.

“They were losing a really important amenity in their neighborhood,” she said. “But we’re at this point where it’s been so long since the closure, they didn’t love just the vacant building being there either.”

Due to the award being a state-awarded credit, Russett explained that the state, not the city, would be monitoring Roosevelt Ridge to ensure the housing rate is still affordable.

Simon Andrew, executive director of The Housing Fellowship Iowa City notes while it is an important effort to continue to chip away at the decades long affordable housing issue, the project is just that; a chip. 

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“It’s just scratching the surface of our community’s need,” he said. “We’re at least 10,000 units below where we need to be. But that being said, every single project gets us farther down that road.”

Andrew said since the 2008 recession and the more recent pandemic, affordable housing has taken a heavy blow. 

Material costs have gone up since the COVID-19 pandemic, Andrew said, along with property values which makes it more difficult for developers to acquire sites.

“It’s on both sides of the equation. It’s dramatically more expensive to create new housing, and the incomes of folks who would be buying or running those homes are not sufficient to cover that cost,” he said. “They’re both moving in the wrong direction.”

Andrew said the award is many developers’ only way of building on a site and getting a worthwhile return.

“90 percent of all new subsidized units nationally are [the award] projects, and 25 percent of all new apartments total nationally are [the award] projects,” he said. 

Though the Together We Grow project is only a step to Andrew, he said he sees a more substantial fix in the local option sales tax. 

The local option sales tax in Iowa City is an extra one percent sales tax that the city would collect to fund local projects.

It has been placed on the city ballot for Nov. 4.

Most notably to Andrew, the tax slates 25 percent of the local option revenue being used for affordable housing, that would equate to as much as $2.5 million a year dedicated to affordable housing in Iowa City.

“We think that that’s really critical going forward, especially as federal funds for or at the very least, are uncertain that we’re going to have to do this ourselves,” he said. “Nobody’s coming to save us.”