30 safe places to call home to be built on 192
Years ago, when she embarked on a mission to assure every person in Osceola County had a safe place to call home, Hope Partnership CEO Mary Downey figured that she’d lead a great legion of case managers and they’d “Never get into (providing) housing.”
Fast forward to Thursday, when she was joined by local leaders and dignitaries in announcing Hope Partnership’s first real estate purchase to achieve that.
The organization just closed on the purchase of the Crown Motel, and will spend the next year converting the hotel rooms into 30 studio apartments of affordable housing.
It will become Thrive Studios, a name chosen carefully, Downey said.
“This will be a place for people to live in a safe place to call home and find success, hope and a new future,” she said.
While 30 units are not a lot for the need — Downey expects them to fill up quickly — it goes along with projects that the Osceola Council on Aging and Park Place Behavioral Center are building out of the ground currently.
“And we didn’t have to have a groundbreaking, there was already a beautiful building here, and so well taken care of,” Downey said of the culmination of a 14-month process to acquire the property.
“When we started this work, I fully believed we had enough housing in this community. But 10 years ago … was very, very different. The reality set in in about 2016 that there was a critical housing shortage, and things had to change.”
At that time, Hope Partnership set out to achieve more housing-focused projects, Downey said, and critical conversations began, and partnerships formed.
“We didn’t want to just talk or complain about it. We wanted to provide a solution, and tell the community we’d put our work toward this type of project,” she said. “We definitely have hopes of doing more of these. We have five acres of land (off Old Vineland Road) where we can house families; these units will house individuals. We want to do more. That looks like raising more money for non-profits to do this kind of work.”
The location, at the corner of Armstrong Avenue and U.S. Highway 192, featured “good bones” and checked a lot of boxes, Downey said. The Crown Motel is right on a mass transit route and has nearby shopping, employment centers and medical facilities. The project will cost Hope Partnership $5.8 million; of that, $2.7 million is the purchase price, and now renovations will begin. At the same time, Downey and Hope Partnership are working with the Osceola County School District to achieve a sliding scale for studio apartments to pay a lower school impact fee; it is currently $12,165 per unit regardless of the dwelling size. Downey told the School Board on Sept. 19 that the current fee would represent 38 percent of the total conversion cost.
As its name suggests, it’s partnerships making something like this possible; Hope Partnership has thus far received $1.75 million in funding from U.S. Rep. Darren Soto’s office, $1 million from Osceola County and another $500,000 earmarked by County Commissioner Cheryl Grieb, $500,000 from the state of Florida and a $1 million loan from the Florida Community Loan program.
“We have 1,000 (affordable housing units) in Osceola County, but it isn’t enough,” Grieb said.
“I want to thank Mary for her dedication fighting for affordable housing. The demand has never been higher for seniors, veterans and working families,” said state Sen. Victor Torres. “By working together, an organization like Hope Partnership can reduce that demand. We know these are the right folks to help our neighbors.”
