The Davis City Council’s Tuesday vote cleared a procedural step toward a roughly $15 million rehabilitation loan for three affordable housing communities: Twin Pines Apartments, Tremont Green and Moore Village. Mutual Housing California owns the properties and plans to use the financing for repairs; the city is not taking on the loan.
The California Public Finance Authority is authorized to issue tax-exempt bonds and will loan up to $15 million to Mutual Housing, as reported by Abridged, a publication of PBS KVIE. Mutual Housing plans to use the money for work at the three Davis properties to support their long-term viability and affordability.
Assistant City Manager Kelly Stachowicz made clear there is no financial obligation on the city's part, according to the same report. Davis will not back the loan or provide any direct financing — the city's role is purely to satisfy a federal requirement that lets the bonds qualify for tax-exempt status in the first place.
Why Davis Had to Vote At All
Local TEFRA approval is part of the financing process, according to the City of Los Angeles. The city carries no debt exposure.
The California Public Finance Authority, known as CalPFA, now includes more than 50 other local agencies alongside Davis, per the Abridged report. The authority is governed by five members of the Kings County Board of Supervisors and operates across the state, Abridged notes.
CalPFA was formed under California's Joint Exercise of Powers Act by Kings County and the Kings County Housing Authority, and its website lists an annual administration fee and a benefit program, according to the California Public Finance Authority. The authority was created to raise cash for public and private projects, and the Davis report notes it recently renewed its consulting contract with GPM Municipal Advisors, a Walnut Creek firm contracted to staff CalPFA deals and provide guidance, for another five years.
Three Aging Communities, One Resyndication
The three Davis properties are all at least two decades old and need upgrades to HVAC or plumbing, per the Abridged reporting. Repairs will provide residents with new paint, flooring, insulation, countertops and roofing. Moore Village, at 2444 Moore Blvd in the Wildhorse neighborhood, was built in the early 2000s and contains 58 to 59 townhome units housing roughly 146 low-income residents, according to Mutual Housing California.
Twin Pines and Tremont Green are among the three properties slated for rehabilitation.
Parker Evans, acquisitions manager for Mutual Housing, said the organization is reinvesting in its communities more than two decades after construction and will request no city money for the work.
The State Allocation and a Separate Example
The California Debt Limit Allocation Committee allocates the state’s annual tax-exempt private-activity bond cap, including for qualified residential rental projects, according to the California State Treasurer’s Office.
A May 10, 2023, committee meeting packet separately listed an extension request for Delano RAD, a qualified residential rental project. The packet describes an extension request for that project, not the Davis financing.
How the Bond Money Actually Moves
Once released, the tax-exempt bonds give third-party investors an incentive to buy in for the tax credit, with the resulting bond-sale revenue provided to Mutual Housing as a loan that the nonprofit must then repay, per the Abridged account.
The scale of the Davis deal is modest next to CalPFA's broader statewide portfolio. In September alone, the authority approved $187 million in revenue bonds for St. Anton Communities housing projects in unincorporated Placer County, Rocklin and Roseville, plus $400 million in healthcare bonds for Sharp HealthCare in San Diego County, according to PBS KVIE. Against those nine-figure transactions, the roughly $15 million earmarked for Davis represents a small fraction of CalPFA's September activity alone.
The nonprofit has been active elsewhere in the region too — it broke ground last October on Sakura, a 134-unit, $56 million all-electric affordable housing complex in Midtown Sacramento funded through state sustainable housing grants, as Hoodline reported at the time.
