Since 2001, The Salvation Army of Birmingham has been researching potential properties to help it expand its services and the number of families it can help. The Salvation Army has existed in Birmingham since 1899, providing an important safety net for everything from helping people pay their utility bills to helping communities in crisis.
The Salvation Army shelter is the only one in town that serves men, women and children in one location. Since its most recent building was built in the 1960s, the number of families needing shelter and the amount of time they need it have grown.
Bradley attorneys served as advisors and transactional counsel for the development and financing of The Salvation Army’s new Center of Hope – a 4.1-acre campus with a 119,000-square-foot building complex at the former site of a historic elementary school in North Birmingham. The project creates headquarters office space for the Area Command, classrooms for life skills training and other educational programs, and a cafeteria and dorm space for men, women and children.
Bradley used federal new markets tax credit financing and a self-leveraged structure for the $26 million project. In connection with the project, The Salvation Army sold its existing building to a local governmental agency for future expansion of the civic center.
The Center of Hope project involved financing from three separate community development lending entities and a third-party institutional investor. It also involved creating two “portions of a business” to meet the lenders’ varying programmatic requirements, as well as using existing charitable funding as leverage in a multi-tier, flow-through structure.
This is the first time that The Salvation Army has used this type of financing, and it yielded a multi-million dollar benefit. The transaction closed in August 2016, and The Salvation Army broke ground on the new Center of Hope in 2016, with completion planned for later in 2017.
