Repurposing a Historic Mill for Affordable Housing in a Growing Community

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Repurposing a Historic Mill for Affordable Housing in a Growing Community

 

In the borough of East Greenville in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the adaptive reuse of an industrial building from the late 19th century is both preserving a treasured historic asset and providing the community of 3,000 people with needed affordable housing. Working in cooperation with the borough and county governments and the nonprofit Genesis Housing Corporation, developer Ingerman transformed the former home of the Boyertown Burial Casket Company into the 71-unit, mixed-income Willows at East Greenville. As the area transitions from rural countryside to a more suburban environment, housing affordability has become a more significant challenge. East Greenville’s proximity to nearby cities including Allentown, Bethlehem, Quakertown, and Harleysville gives residents of the Willows convenient access to employment opportunities and high-quality amenities, including nearby parks and schools. The project has received a 2023 Affordable Housing Vanguard Award, which recognizes creative and innovative affordable housing developments, and a 2022 Montgomery Award, which “recognizes the best in planning, design, and advocacy in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Adapting a Neglected Factory Building

The former manufacturing facility was originally constructed in 1880, with additions in 1919 and 1925. These additions left the building with three distinct structural systems and ceiling heights, presenting both a challenge for developers and an opportunity to create a variety of floorplans and unit sizes to suit diverse housing needs. The main structure is a five-story brick building with one three-story addition and two single-story additions. The site also included a two-story caretaker’s building and a nonhistoric garage building, which the developers demolished to accommodate a playground and resident parking. Ingerman worked with the U.S. National Park Service to list the building in the National Register of Historic Places, which helped the project secure the historic tax credits needed to complete the conversion of the property.

That the project happened at all is something of a happy accident. John Randolph, development principal at Ingerman, discovered the building while driving through town with his family during a ski trip and realized the building’s potential despite its blighted condition. With buy-in from the local community, Ingerman’s application for funding from Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency was approved in the summer of 2018; construction began the following summer, and the certificate of occupancy was granted in late 2020, with units occupied by the spring of the following year.

Project Details

Of the 71 units at the Willows, 12 rent at market rates; 23 rent to households earning no more than 60 percent of the area median income (AMI); 32 units rent to households earning no more than 50 percent of AMI; and 4 units rent to households earning no more than 20 percent of AMI. The development’s unit mix includes 2 efficiency apartments; 20 one-bedroom units; 33 two-bedroom units; and 16 three-bedroom units large enough to accommodate families. Eleven of the project’s units were supported with HOME Investment Partnerships Program funds. One unit is reserved for referrals from Your Way Home, Montgomery County’s unified housing crisis response system. Four units were funded through the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement (PHARE) fund, a financing tool the Pennsylvania legislature established in 2010 to support the creation and rehabilitation of affordable housing in the commonwealth. The fund prioritizes projects that rehabilitate blighted, abandoned, or at-risk housing or reuse vacant land that once had housing. A breakdown of funding sources appears in table 1.

The units feature kitchens with islands or breakfast bars, large windows, and vaulted ceilings with beams and other preserved historic elements. Community amenities at the Willows include a fitness center, laundry room, a lounge, the playground, and an onsite resident services program.

The building’s historic features are especially visible in its common spaces. In fact, Ingerman leaned into the site’s past as a casket factory, adopting some tongue-in-cheek decorative elements such as displaying caskets in the common spaces along with posters of celebrities buried in Boyertown Burial Casket Company’s caskets.

Structural and Environmental Remediation

Although the building had other uses after casket-making operations ceased (most recently as the home of a manufacturer of plumbing equipment), the structure’s overall state of neglect meant that it needed significant rehabilitation work. Ingerman installed approximately 500 new windows, which were custom made to fit into the existing window openings and meet the historic preservation guidelines of the U.S. National Park Service. The wooden interior structure from the building’s 1880 section had to be completely removed, and other structural elements, although less compromised, still needed replacement or other significant renovation. Leaks from the long-neglected roof created water damage that required mitigation. Chemicals left behind by the plumbing manufacturer required environmental remediation that included the removal of eight 6,000-gallon tanks as well as several unlabeled 55-gallon barrels that required chemical analysis to determine the correct disposal procedure. Today, the upgraded building envelope is just one aspect of the Willows’ energy-efficiency features. Together with high-quality insulation that meets historic preservation requirements, efficient building systems help keep utility costs low for residents and the building operator. The Willows incorporates the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency’s Green Building Criteria, including ENERGY STAR® appliances and efficient light fixtures, low-flow plumbing fixtures, green-label carpeting, paint with low levels of volatile organic compounds, and landscaping featuring drought-tolerant native plants.

The Willows at East Greenville demonstrates how important an inspired vision can be for bringing a project to fruition. Randolph reports that, before Ingerman’s involvement, the East Greenville community had not received any viable reuse plans for the old factory building, likely because the site’s rural location and significant challenges made most redevelopment plans financially infeasible. With a workable plan from Ingerman, the community eagerly came onboard, says Randolph, with officials expediting the process to rezone the site for residential use. Despite supply chain and construction delays related to the pandemic, Ingerman was able to deliver the Willows within the allotted budget. In this case, it took a fortuitous discovery by an affordable housing professional on vacation to kickstart the process of bringing the old casket factory back to life.