SANTA ROSA — On a hot morning this week, an excited crowd gathered to celebrate the groundbreaking of the first large rental housing community built in Santa Rosa since 2006.
The new 50-unit community is going up next to Elma E. Barrera Elementary School at 20209 FM 506.
It is being built through the Community Development Corporation of Brownsville in partnership with NeighborWorks America.
CDCB is a nonprofit community housing development organization founded in 1974.
Nick Mitchell, the executive director, said he could not be happier that the project is beginning to be built.
“We are very, very excited. This is a place a lot of people call home and we want more people to call it home. We believe small towns all over America need to prosper and grow,” Mitchell said.
“This is a persistent poverty community and we don’t believe in persistent poverty. So let’s do something about it. We are here to at least do our part.”
According to Mitchell, CDCB looks for towns that need affordable housing and Santa Rosa looked like the perfect fit.
“We do a lot of methodological strategies to see whether a city needs a rental community. We do census data, check the employment rates and see design data,” Mitchell said.
“We look for the needs that have to be met and try to meet them. We want the families of Santa Rosa to stop wanting to leave and move to other places searching for affordable homes. We hope to create that for them.”
The target is working families that earn 60 percent or less of the city’s area median income.
Across the road, sugar cane is being grown, which is why the name “Casitas de Azucar” came to mind.
“Sugar is clearly an important part of Santa Rosa and sugar cane is right across from where the homes will be built. It seemed fitting to name it that way,” Mitchell said.
The community was designed by bcWorkshop, a nonprofit community design center. Casitas de Azucar will have one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom units.
Rental fees will be based on size and renter’s income. It will have a community clubhouse, playground, walking paths, a trail and a pavilion with barbecue grills and picnic tables.
Casitas de Azucar is an $8 million development that received a 9 percent tax credit allocation from the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in July 2018.
CDCB, National Equity Fund, TDHCA and BBVA financed the project with support from the City of Santa Rosa and Santa Rosa Independent School District.
The groundbreaking event was to celebrate the future home community but also was an opportunity for businesses and organizations to showcase their services.
Mayor Andres Contreras said this will enhance their community’s welfare and social and economic development.
“Hopefully, this will mean some of our youth might want to remain in the community instead of going elsewhere to rent,” Contreras said. “It is a blessing for our community. In the words of the book of Jeremiah, God says let there be home so people can inhabit them and let there be produce and let there be fields so people may partake of them.”
The main purpose of this project was to create a space that is close to residents of Santa Rosa — a space they can rent instead of looking some place else.
Mitchell has helped create several communities such as this one and saw that Santa Rosa needed a place like it.
“One of the places we felt was a good spot to build a community like that was Santa Rosa. This is going to be a very affordable rental community, the funding comes from many places but primarily from Low Income Housing Tax Credits Union,” he said.
“It will be a very beautiful place, very much like the one we built in Harlingen. That one won a design award by the Texas Society of Architecture.”
