The Neighborhood Planning Unit for Vine City has given its support to a key height variance for The Simpson, a four-story, 139-unit affordable housing project planned for 840 Joseph E. Boone Blvd. in Northwest Atlanta, according to an NPU-L letter. The project is now scheduled to go before Atlanta’s Zoning Review Board on May 6, according to NPU-L’s meeting agenda information for next week.
Plans for The Simpson call for 34 units for households at 30 percent of area median income or below, 58 at 60 percent of AMI or below, and 47 at 80 percent of AMI or below. The 65-foot project proposal requires a variance from a 55-foot zoning regulation for the site, which would otherwise be too small to allow for the project, developer Quest Community Development Organization writes in its variance application with the city submitted last month.
Without the variance, “the project cannot achieve the density required to provide affordable housing,” Quest Community Development Organization President and CEO Leonard Adams writes.
Plans for the project have been in the works since beyond the fall, when Quest and co-developer Integral Development LLC secured a $15.5 million tax-exempt loan from the project through Invest Atlanta‘s Urban Residential Finance Authority. A Special Administrative Permit application was submitted for the project last month, as well.
Designed by Atlanta-based firm Foley Design Associates, The Simpson would contain 23 one-bedrooms, 84 two-bedrooms, and 32 three-bedrooms. It would also provide 105 parking spaces and hold two courtyards, site plans show.
The project’s one- through three-bedrooms at 30 percent of AMI or below are expected to charge $315 to $360 in rent, with those at 60 percent and 80 percent of AMI expected to charge from $780 to $1,005 and $1,090 to $1,435, respectively. Unit sizes would be 700 square feet for ones, 950 square feet for twos, and 1,100 square feet for threes.
Quest, a nonprofit developer focused on Atlanta’s Westside, owns the roughly 14,000-square-foot parcel of 840 Joseph E. Boone, while the Simpson Street Church of Christ owns the other 90,000 square feet or so of the project site, at 810 Joseph E. Boone, according to property records.
Quest’s development partner on The Simpson, Integral Development LLC, is registered in state filings to the Atlanta address of The Integral Group, a real estate development firm specializing in revitalizing urban communities in markets around the United States.
Budgeted as of the fall to cost about $30.1 million to build, The Simpson is expected to follow a construction timeline of 18 months. Quest hopes to start construction in the fourth quarter of this year, Adams told What Now Atlanta in an email.
