A vacant historic mill in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, R.I., has been transformed into 60 units of mixed-income housing.
Gretchen Ertl
60 King has brought new affordable and market-rate apartments to the Olneyville neighborhood and has created a much more attractive alternative to the existing housing stock in the area, much of which suffers from significant deferred maintenance.
Originally constructed in 1923, the mill once was home to the Rochambeau Worsted Wool manufacturing facility until the 1950s when it was acquired by the Imperial Knife Co., which occupied it through 1998. After that, the building housed several smaller tenants until 2007.
Developer Trinity Financial partnered with community development organizations SWAP and ONE Neighborhood Builders on the adaptive-reuse project, which is one of the first in the Build Olneyville Plan to catalyze redevelopment and investment in the neighborhood.
PROJECT DETAILS
Developers: Trinity Financial, SWAP, and ONE Neighborhood Builders
Architect: ICON Architecture
General Contractor: Pezzuco Construction
Major Funders: Rhode Island Housing; Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission; RBC Capital Markets; Citizens Bank; city of Providence; Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management
The development team brought the building back to its original three-story design, demolishing most of the non-historic additions made throughout the years. One addition from 1944 remains and was converted into community space. It also had to remediate a heavily contaminated brownfield site. The air quality in the building had volatile organic compound levels in excess of what’s permitted for residential occupancy. The building’s existing slab had to be removed and a vapor barrier and sub-slab ventilation system installed.
“60 King has helped to activate what was an underutilized building that had been abandoned for over a decade and in a corner of the neighborhood that had been cut off from the rest of Olneyville,” says Dan Drazen, vice president of development at Trinity Financial.
Six units are for households earning 30% of the area median income (AMI), 48 are for those at 60% of the AMI, and the remainder are market rate. Five units are project-based Sec. 811.
To make the $22.4 million project a reality, Trinity Financial utilized a bifurcated structure, leveraging both 9% and 4% low-income housing tax credits.