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 Earlier this month, a ceremony was held in Birmingham, Alabama to recognize a new, 64-unit affordable housing development recently opened in the city's Avondale neighborhood. The $5.5 million Avondale Gardens development, which became fully occupied in March 2004, was one of six national winners of the Fannie Mae Foundation Maxwell Awards of Excellence. Housing Enterprise of Central Alabama (HECA), a participant in Greater Birmingham's successful 2004 Regional Stewardship Award effort for which it won the Silver ($15,000) prize, provided capital and technical assistance to the project, which was spearheaded by Aletheia House, a substance-abuse treatment provider that previously had offered only transitional housing for its clients. Avondale Gardens, by contrast, is a rental development open to the community at large.
HECA is a Birmingham-based nonprofit organization that catalyzes affordable housing production in the 12-county Greater Birmingham region. It grew out of an affordable housing initiative launched in 2002 by Region 2020, a regional, citizen-based organization, and funded by major financial institutions and community foundations. The extraordinary cooperative partnership among neighborhood leaders, elected officials, the City of Birmingham, HECA, Aletheia House, the finance community, and other local and national partners that made the Avondale Gardens project possible clinched its recognition by the Maxwell Award Committee. The Maxwell Award includes a $50,000 grant that Aletheia House will use to set up a nonprofit housing development corporation. HECA's affiliate nonprofit, the Housing Fund of Central Alabama, awarded a grant to Aletheia House in June to help cover the costs of developing a business plan for the proposed HDC.
Avondale Gardens targets families whose income is up to 60 percent of the metro-wide median income. Additionally, 15 percent of the units are reserved for formerly homeless people who are recovering from mental illness or substance abuse.
Another unique feature of the development is how it blends into and lifts up the surrounding neighborhood, Avondale, a transitional and historic community consisting largely of older homes. Avondale Gardens, in fact, was constructed on neglected and abandoned property. The human-scale, historically compatible architecture of Avondale Gardens helped overcome initial opposition to the project, converting antagonists into advocates and drawing the attention of private developers to the neighborhood.
For more information on Aletheia House, contact Chris Retan at or . For more information on the Maxwell Awards and the Avondale Gardens project, visit the Fannie Mae Foundation's website, http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org. For more information on the 2004 Regional Stewardship Award recipients, consult the May 2004 issue of this newsletter (archived on the ARS website), which has links to descriptions of the projects for which the four award recipients were recognized.
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