Lynn elderly housing residents now have 16 million reasons to smile

LYNN – St. Stephen’s Tower on Pleasant Street, a 130-unit building for elderly housing, will benefit from a pilot program by the state to help rehabilitate distressed properties.St. Stephen’s, owned by both St. Stephen’s Church and Beacon Residential Management of Boston, has received $16.4 million in MassHousing loans, both to renovate the property and to make the units more affordable.The 10-story, 130-unit building is home mainly to senior citizens, with 10 studio apartments, 110 one-bedroom units and 10 two-bedroom apartments.MassHousing has awarded the loan to St. Stephen’s through its Pilot Program for Revitalizing Severely Distressed Properties.”This will help maintain the affordability of the building,” said Matthew Tobyne, regional vice president for Beacon, which, under the new deal, manages the property.”It’s elderly property,” Tobyne said, “and it’s important to increase the amount of quality affordable housing in Lynn.”The original Section 236 mortgage loan and rental assistance contract for St. Stephen’s was to expire in March 2017. However, Tobyne said, Beacon prepaid the balance of the mortgage – mainly to extricate the property from the rules of the old program.As a result of the MassHousing financing, the property will receive Section 8 project-based vouchers through the HUD Moving to Work program, which is administered by the Cambridge Housing Authority. This transaction will extend the affordability at St. Stephen’s for the next 30 years.The Lynn Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development will manage the voucher program, Tobyne said.”It’s up to (LHAND) to make sure that the residents coming into the building on vouchers are income-qualified,” he said. “Also, it’ll be up to them to make sure the building is kept up to quality physical standards to warrant the rent that the vouchers are covering.””Being able to complete varied and innovative types of financing allows us to help renovate and extend the affordability at important housing communities like St. Stephen’s and for the senior citizens who live there,” said MassHousing Executive Director Thomas R. Gleason. “We were pleased to work collaboratively with Beacon Communities to make sure this important affordable community remained available to seniors in Lynn for decades to follow.”The property is nearly 40 years old and is in need of significant repairs and renovation to common areas and apartments, repair and replacement of building systems and increases in energy and water efficiency.”Beacon Communities and our partner, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, are pleased that we were able to work with MassHousing, HUD and the Cambridge Housing Authority to develop a financing plan that enabled us to preserve this much-needed affordable housing community in the City of Lynn,” said Beacon Communities CEO Pamela Goodman.The contractor will be Keith Construction, Inc., the Architect is Bechtel Frank Erickson Architects, Inc. and the management agent is Beacon Residential Management.MassHousing (The Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency) is an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts.