Empty Coventry Gardens slated for loft apartments

CEDAR RAPIDS - Even before the 2008 flood, the three-story building that housed Coventry Gardens Mall in the 200 block of First Avenue SE had been limping along, a testament to the long decline of retail in the heart of many a downtown.

The building has sat gutted out and empty since the flood, until now.

A new life - 19 loft apartments and two street-level retail shops, one slated to be home for a return of a Bruegger's bagel shop to the downtown area - is in the offing for the Coventry building and one attached to it, both across the street from the city's brand new convention center.

“We went around and looked at some things in downtown Des Moines ... and in downtown Nashville,” Cedar Rapids developer Darryl High explained on Friday. “And we thought this could be really cool for Cedar Rapids and provide some housing for people who want to live downtown, whether they work in an office, at the new convention center or maybe they work at the (proposed) casino. For a downtown to be vibrant, you definitely need to have downtown living.”

The Coventry Lofts project, if it comes to be, will be the latest example of how the city - with the help of substantial federal disaster assistance - is attempting to replace more than 1,300 housing units lost to the June 2008 flood.

“As far as housing support, the federal government didn't let us down,” Mayor Ron Corbett declared last week in his State of the City speech.

Those federal dollars for new projects continue to be available, and it is another round of those dollars for which the Coventry Lofts project and nine other Cedar Rapids projects are now competing.

There is $18 million in federal dollars to be handed out this spring by the Iowa Economic Development Authority, and $44 million in requests from projects across the state, Paula Mitchell, the city of Cedar Rapids' grants project manager, said.

The competition to make the city of Cedar Rapids' list has been stiff, too; 13 housing proposals were analyzed, scored and ranked by a review team that included Mitchell and other city staff, developers, neighborhood leaders, design professionals and preservation advocates.

Of the projects, High's $4-million Coventry Lofts project won top billing from the city review team.

Ranked second is a $4.55-million project from Hatch Development Group. The group is proposing to build a 30-unit Ninth Avenue SE Brickstones, a slightly smaller version of two Brickstones apartment complexes built by Hatch since the flood on Sixth Street SE, also in the Oakhill neighborhood.

Ranked third is a $4-million project from the Cedar Rapids Neighborhood Development Corp., which has purchased two flood-damaged school district warehouse buildings in the 600 block of G Avenue NW and proposes to convert them into 29 apartments.

Dale Todd, Hatch vice president for Eastern Iowa development, said on Friday that the latest Brickstones project will turn vacant lots, which can leave a perception of blight and disinvestment, into quality housing for the Oakhill neighborhood.

For his part, Marty Hoeger, president/CEO of the Neighborhood Development Corp., on Friday said he hoped that his project attracted notice for the way in which it transforms and repurposes two flood-damaged warehouse buildings in the Ellis Boulevard NW neighborhood.

High on Friday said he purchased the Coventry Building in downtown Cedar Rapids a couple of years before the flood with no grand plans, but the flood and now the city's flood-recovery, he said, have pushed him to redevelop faster than he otherwise would have.

“Any time you get a lot of things going on ... ,” High said, pointing to the new federal courthouse and the convention center and the prospects for a casino nearby. “No one development can really make anything happen. You've got to have lots of people, and we're probably the smallest development group in the bunch. But we're excited about our little project.”

High said the projects that now are coming to be in the downtown area are ones that, but for the flood, would have been languishing on a 10-to-15-year building list.

“Nobody in the city looks at the flood as anything other than a total disaster that totally hurt lots of small businesses, families and housing,” High said. “But if we're going to have a natural disaster, the way our community has fought back is commendable.”

The federal funds for which the housing portions of projects are competing are provided to the state through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program. The incentives will provide 54 percent of the cost of the High project, 66 percent of the Hatch project and 65 percent of the Neighborhood Development Corp.'s project.

Mitchell said developers have built 438 Cedar Rapids apartments in earlier rounds of this specific disaster program for multifamily housing. For those projects, $22.5 million in CDBG funds have been committed to support about $29 million in private dollars, she said.

In the latest competition for funds, projects must rent out 51 percent of their units to households earning 80 percent or less of the area median income.