Capstone at Covington Shows What an MRB-Plus-CDBG-DR Stack Looks Like in Practice

A Stack Built From Three Separate Public Sources, Not One

Most financing detail that reaches the public in a press release is a single headline number. This release is unusually complete, and that completeness is the useful part: it shows three distinct public capital sources stacked on one deal -- a tax-exempt bond issuance, a tax-credit allocation, and a disaster-recovery block grant -- rather than treating any one of them as the whole story. Adding just the two largest disclosed sources, the $18 million MRB and the $15.1 million CDBG-DR award, comes to $33.1 million in public financing before LIHTC equity is even added -- $413,750 per unit across the 80 units, from disclosed sources alone.

That CDBG-DR piece is worth noting on its own: it is federal disaster-recovery money routed through a state program, not a housing-specific funding line at all. For a developer working a site in a parish that received a Hurricane Laura, Delta, or Ida disaster declaration, a state CDBG-DR allocation run through the housing finance agency is a real, if less obvious, place to look for gap financing alongside the more familiar HOME or Housing Trust Fund sources.

What the Credit Size Suggests About How This Deal Was Structured

LHC's release does not say whether the $979,460 LIHTC award is a 4% or 9% allocation, but the numbers point toward 4%. Spread across 80 units, it works out to about $12,240 in annual credit per unit -- modest next to the $18 million bond issuance sitting alongside it. Louisiana's 9% credits are competitively scored through the annual Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) process and are typically sized to cover a much larger share of a project's cost on their own, without needing a separate bond issuance of this size to reach full financing. A bond-financed deal claiming the 4% as-of-right credit that accompanies tax-exempt bond financing is the more likely read here -- though that is EZFeasi's own inference from the disclosed numbers, not a claim LHC's release itself makes.

The distinction matters for anyone modeling a comparable deal: a 4% bond-financed structure sidesteps the QAP scoring competition entirely, trading a smaller, non-competitive credit for the certainty of not competing against every other 9% applicant in the state that year.

A Fast Construction Timeline Worth Benchmarking

From an April 1 groundbreaking to an anticipated February 2027 completion is roughly ten to eleven months of construction for 80 new units. That is a genuinely fast timeline for garden-style multifamily new construction, and it is a real data point -- not an industry average pulled from elsewhere -- for anyone building a construction-schedule assumption into a proforma for a similarly sized Louisiana workforce housing deal. The project team is DNA Workshop as architect, Milton J. Womack Construction as general contractor, and Acro Management of Louisiana as the property manager once it opens.