Housing

Creating Affordable Housing

Community Asset Preservation Corporation (CAPC) is a nonprofit organization that acquires vacant and abandoned properties to stabilize and revitalize communities. The organization is a longtime pro bono client of the firm and the subsidiary of another such client, New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC). CAPC partners with local community builders and contractors to rehabilitate and return properties to productive use as quality, affordable housing. NJCC channels investments from financial institutions, insurance companies, and other socially responsible entities to a network of nonprofits and hundreds of low- and moderate-income families.

In 2020, lawyers in our mortgage finance practice structured a joint venture between CAPC and an unaffiliated nonprofit organization that also focuses on transforming underserved neighborhoods. The joint venture obtained financing to acquire a pool of distressed properties that will be rehabilitated using CAPC’s “healthy homes” standard and sold to low- and moderate-income families as a way of creating intergenerational wealth. Structured programs similar to this one will be replicated and scaled for future CAPC transactions.

Using innovative strategies like these since the Great Recession of 2009, CAPC and NJCC have added approximately 1,300 affordable housing units to the market and helped nearly 1,600 low- and moderate-income families avoid housing displacement.