Q&A with Executive director of NeighborWorks Southern New Hampshire Robert Tourigny

‘The Pearl Street Lot (in Manchester) is going to be 126 apartments for us. … It’s a challenge from a financing standpoint to make the numbers work on a development like this, but the need is so huge. I feel like we have to do bigger and better to address those needs.’ (Courtesy photo)

Robert Tourigny has been leading NeighborWorks Southern New Hampshire for more than 20 years, but he’s still chasing the big ones.

In August, NeighborWorks celebrated the early stages of The Apartments at Pearl & Orange, a $70 million, multi-phase project in downtown Manchester that will include 126 affordable apartments, ranging from $1,100 to $1,800 per month, 12 townhomes and a 455-space parking garage.

The development — the biggest the nonprofit has ever undertaken — returns housing to a property that was once a neighborhood for homes and businesses in the late 1960s before urban renewal efforts.

The 100 Flanders St. project is a partnership with Lansing Melbourne Group and the City of Manchester, which responded to a request for proposals from the city in 2021 for the development of the Pearl & Orange Street parking lot in downtown Manchester.

NeighborWorks, which originally was focused on Manchester, now encompasses 31 communities in southern New Hampshire for affordable rental housing, and 81 New Hampshire communities for home ownership and financial wellness education programs and services from the state’s southern border to the Lakes Region.

Tourigny recently visited the offices of NH Business Review to appear as a guest on the “Down to Business” podcast with editors Amanda Andrews and Mike Cote. This article was adapted from that conversation. Listen to it in its entirety at nhbr.com and on popular streaming services.

Q. We would love to hear a little bit more about the organization where you’ve been since 2005, which is pretty impressive.

A. The history of our organization goes back to 1992 when we were first formed as Manchester Neighborhood Housing Services, a nonprofit community development organization that was meant to help address many of the needs in the city of Manchester, but particularly around creating affordable housing and revitalizing neighborhoods back then. And so, it was cleaning up properties and cleaning up blocks, helping people become empowered through home ownership and being able to own their own home, and preserving some of the multifamily housing stock for apartments in that neighborhood. We’ve had a lot of growth since those early days.

Q. You’re celebrating more than 20 years with NeighborWorks by working on the biggest project in its history and probably in your own history. How do you gauge the significance of this project to your career and the housing market?

A. We’ve done lots of multifamily affordable rental housing projects over the years. On average, our project sizes range from 25 to 35, and then a couple of 45-unit projects. Our biggest project prior to this was 57 units in Manchester, and that was probably almost 17 years ago, so this is a big undertaking.

The Pearl Street Lot is going to be 126 apartments for us. I’ve kiddingly said before, ‘Well, if we can do 50 units, we could do a hundred units, and if we could do a hundred units, we can do more.’ They do get more complicated and more complex. It’s a challenge from a financing standpoint to make the numbers work on a development like this, but the need is so huge. I feel like we have to do bigger and better to address those needs.

Q. Back in 2021, NeighborWorks and Lansing Melbourne Group responded to the request for proposals from the city. Snce then, the price of real estate construction materials, labor costs, has escalated. How has that impacted the project?

A. The city published a request for proposals to redevelop the Pearl Street Lot, and it was a very underutilized space at that point in time. It’s obviously gone through some iterations over the years, but after COVID the parking lot was really underutilized.

That RFP came out, and we responded to say that we can build affordable housing there, but we don’t build parking garages and we don’t build market rate (housing), so if you find somebody that wants to do those other components but is not interested in doing the affordable component, we’d be happy to participate.

They brought us together with LMG to come up with a proposal and a concept that worked and met all those needs. But as you mentioned, construction costs, interest rates — everything — just got more prohibitively expensive.

Their portion of the project became less feasible from an economic standpoint. We had to sit down and retool, and we asked LMG if we could do more affordable units, and if they did less market-rate units, would that work?

They said, why don’t you do all the affordable units on the Pearl Street lot, and we’ll focus our market-rate project on the Hartnett Lot, and we’ll build the garage that can accompany your project on the Pearl Street lot. And so that’s where we’re at today.

We’ve been able to come up with a new financing concept and financing structure to be able to pull together the parking garage, the 126 units of multifamily and eventually a dozen townhomes for sale.