With 167 senior residents and a police officer being forced out of the Ladrey Senior High-Rise by the end of the year, Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority CEO Erik C. Johnson says there’s actually an opportunity to capitalize on the situation.
“This comes down to whether or not the city is going to support seniors the way that we want to support seniors,” Johnson told ALXnow. “We’re not asking the city to finance it, nor is the city taking a first position loss in the event that something goes wrong.”
City Council will review the proposal at its meeting tonight. Additionally, the next ARHA Board meeting is on Monday, June 23.
The project
City Council, in Jan. 2024, approved the plan to demolish the existing 11-story, 170-unit affordable apartment building at 300 Wythe Street, which houses seniors and residents with disabilities, as well as ARHA’s former headquarters at 600 N. Fairfax Street. The replacement would have been a 270-unit L-shaped building with heights ranging from six to seven stories.
Johnson, who started in his role last fall, determined with ARHAs Board that the Ladrey Senior High-Rise project in Old Town was infeasible due to a $40 million funding gap.
“When the project was conceived, the world was different,” Johnson said. “Credit pricing was different. Construction pricing was different. Interest rates were lower. There were different types of soft money in the environment that you could deal with. All those things changed from 2020 to 2025, which meant that the concept that worked five years ago, it just didn’t work.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development “terminated operating support for building management and maintenance” due to delays in the redevelopment, and now ARHA plans on moving the residents out of the 1970s-era building by Thanksgiving.
The Silver Fox
ARHA is asking the city to back loans to acquire Alate Old Town (1122 First Street), a recently built senior housing apartment building in the Braddock neighborhood, for the relocation of Ladrey Senior Hi-Rise residents.
ARHA said that the developer behind The Alate “wishes to exit the project and has agreed to its sale for $56.8 million,” according to a staff memo. The property was assessed at $53.1 million earlier this year, according to city records.
ARHA plans on investing $6 million of its savings into the First Street property, renaming it Silver Fox, and has applied for Virginia Resources Authority bond funding.
“It’s serendipity, right?” Johnson said. “The average rent for a Ladrey resident is $369, and their rents will not change. They’re going to move into a brand new Class A building seven blocks away that was done less than two years ago.”
Johnson wants to start a full renovation of the Ladrey Hi-Rise in the first quarter of 2027, and ideally have it completed by 2029. ARHA would then own multiple affordable housing senior housing apartment buildings.
“ARHA is going to write a check for about $6 million,” Johnson said. “We’re going to put an additional $3.4 million in a debt service reserve fund, which means that if something happens, the first year of interest and principal payments are paid, and then, in addition to the debt service reserve fund, ARHA is going to put up $9 million in collateral, in real estate assets, or a line of credit that will backstop the city’s contribution.”
Johnson said ARHA has $18.4 million in committed capital to mitigate the city’s risk.
“We could still rent it out differently or sell the asset,” Johnson said. “The city’s moral obligation only comes into a play if there’s a complete failure of either our ability to reposition the asset, to sell it to somebody else and exhaust all the all the equity and guarantees that have been put in place.”
