Reprinted from Des Moines Register

   Apartments planned for Des Moines' historic Sherman Hill district pale next to a billion-dollars' worth of downtown development on the drawing board.

   But Jack Hatch's plan to build a row of vintage looking brick buildings on a vacant lot of 15th Street and Woodland Avenue is a welcome sign of what officials call downtown's imminent revival.

   "People want to live downtown," Hatch, a Democrat state legislator who is the project's developer, said Tuesday. "There is an urban culture in Des Moines. If we understand it, we can use it. It attracts people."

   The $5 million project marks the first of its kind in years, city officials said. It will include 51 one and two bedroom apartments in three brick buildings built in an early 20th-century row-house style.

   The apartments will be built across the street from the landmark Hoyt Sherman place and will contain commercial space that Hatch said could be used for restaurants or shops.

   Thirteen units will be rent-subsidized because the project is receiving a grant from the city of Des Moines. The rest will be priced at market value and range from $700 to $850 per month.

   "I don't know of anything like that, with is mixed uses, that's been built in many, many years," Mayor Preston Daniels said.

   The Des Moines City Council approved Hatch's request Monday to rezone the property from its historical residential designation to allow the business and residential mix.

   The city, county, and Iowa Department of Economic Development have awarded $725,000 in grants to the project.

   The rest of the money will come from $300,000 in tax credits, $440,000 in equity, selling $2.7 million in tax-exempt bonds, and an $800,000 loan from the Neighborhood Finance Corp., an agency that provides low-cost residential housing loans.

   The Neighborhood Development Corp., a similar agency set up in 1999 to help people build homes and businesses, will buy the land for $400,000 and donate it, said the agency's executive director, Carol Bower.

   Three Des Moines neighborhood activists - Bob Mickle, president of Des Moines Neighbors, and Sherman Hill residents Jack Porter and Dave Mowitz - compose the project's board. Hatch has invested $30,000 in the project and will receive a fee for developing the project based on the project's overall cost.

   Daniels said new homes downtown signal urban rebirth.

   "If you look around the country, any cities building new downtown housing projects are having success," he said. "People want to be in the mix, where there's a chance something's going on."

   Vision Iowa pledged $70 million this month to help build the Iowa Events Center arena and exhibition hall, along with downtown attractions totaling $300 million. The projects, private development and major highway and street reconstruction planned for the next five years bring the total planned construction in Des Moines to more than $1 billion.

   Plans to build roughly 150 apartments near the site of a planned Court Avenue entertainment district are close to having financing in place, Daniels said.


   Hatch said his apartments will be within a few blocks of 801 Grand, the Meredith Publishing campus and Iowa Methodist Medical Center.

   He hopes to begin construction by this fall and have the units finished and rented by next summer.