A Place for Everyone?

Architect Jeremy Erdreich and his family’s development company, Metropolitan LLC, are working on upscale lofts, such as those in the Jefferson Home Furniture building, to meet the demand for high-end urban living. But they have also done their part to ensure people of lower incomes enjoy Downtown’s revival.

Metropolitan’s Phoenix Lofts, along with Park Place, are the only two new residential developments specifically designed to take in households earning moderate incomes or less.

Erdreich says his desire to create affordable units Downtown started early in his career.

After completing college at Yale and Harvard (where his coursework included designing an affordable housing project) and after living in an eclectic New York City neighborhood, Erdreich decided to come back to Birmingham in 1996. He was excited about the growing potential for Downtown’s revitalization.

In his first year back, a developer took him on a personal loft tour. Erdreich asked how much the units were renting for. The developer told him the rents were high enough to make the loft conversion profitable.

“Besides, it’s good we’re charging high rents, because we don’t want to attract the wrong element Downtown,” Erdreich recalls him saying. “I said, ‘What do you mean, “the wrong element?” He said, ‘I think you know what I mean.’ It gave me an eerie, icky feeling.

“After that meeting, it became a priority for me personally to figure how to make urban living more accessible to people with moderate and lower incomes,” he says.

It took Metropolitan LLC several years to assemble enough funding sources and a few more years to convert the 168,000-square-foot former South Central Bell headquarters into the Phoenix Lofts, a $9.5 million project. Funding sources such as Alabama low-income housing tax credits and City HOME funds require that 80% of its 74 units remain affordable for 15 years.

In Birmingham, “lower income” is unfairly associated with negative ../images of poor black people, Erdreich says. In other cities, though, it more often means musicians and other artists, restaurant wait staff and young professionals making median incomes or less, members of the so-called “Creative Class,” he says. Many in that class are Phoenix Lofts residents.

With Birmingham’s hot loft condo market, though, Erdreich says it’s unlikely that developers will build affordable units without some government intervention.

So he worries that the expensive units to soon flood the market will draw too many of the well-heeled and upset the socio-economic balance that’s important for the genuine urban experience.

Erdreich believes that creative people, in all their shapes and forms, are what make an urban community vibrant and successful. They’re the ones who’ll demand cool and cheap entertainment, restaurants and retail stores. “All rich people in one place is not interesting . . . You can go to Mountain Brook for that,” he says.

“To me, the interesting thing about living downtown is the ability to meet strangers, people different from yourself, where everyone’s living in the same neighborhood. The same goes to how you spend your time at night. I want different options, from the very expensive to the cheap. That’s what downtown living is all about, having that diversity.”

For more information about Jefferson Loft Condominiums, visit www.jeffersonloft.com. And visit www.thephoenixbuilding.com for more information about its loft rental apartments.