Project Management Case Study

Case Study:

Project Management, Market Research, and Financing for the conversion of federal public senior housing to low income assisted living.

The Goal:
Determine which of five senior apartment buildings is best suited for assisted living and perform a study on the chosen building for conversion to assisted living.

The Solution:
A recommendation for converting a portion of the 100-unit Boa Vista Senior Housing facility to assisted living. The recommended funding for capital costs is to pledge HUD capital grant funds and for assisted living operations to be subsidized by GAFC and SSIG.

The Process:
LDS won an RFP process and entered into a Consulting Services Agreement with the New Bedford Housing Authority in June 2001 to provide building inspection and evaluation services, a resident needs assessment, cost estimating and financial analysis. Along with The Primary Group and Verve Senior Living Management, we submitted our report to the New Bedford Housing Authority in October 2001.

The report includes a resident needs assessment of the residents at four senior housing apartment projects run by the housing authority, a demographic needs assessment, a competitive analysis, a physical assessment of Boa Vista and financial feasibility for implementation of an assisted living program at Boa Vista.

The conclusion to our resident needs assessment is that the majority of the senior housing built by the housing

authority approximately twenty-five years ago have become naturally occurring retirement communities ("NORC"s). The residents have aged in place and need services above and beyond those typically provided by a real estate management company, therefore residents would benefit greatly from the full time personal care and services offered by assisted living. We identified over sixty residents who were both clinical eligible and financially eligible for assisted living.

Among other things, we recommended adding additional common space on the first floor and turning floors 2-4 into assisted living floors. The end result would be 51 independent one-bedroom units and 45 assisted living units.

We estimated the development costs and examined several possible financing scenarios. We recommended that this financing be coupled with other capital needs of the housing authority in order to gain economies of scale. We also recommended an action plan for the development process.