Dive Brief:

• A $33 million residential building that will house homeless veterans has opened in Washington, DC’s booming NoMa (North of Massachusetts Avenue) district, according to The Washington Post.

• Designed by Sorg Architects, the John and Jill Ker Conway Residence building contains 124 one-bedroom apartments, including 60 for homeless veterans and 64 affordable and low-income units. The 14-story building, which offers an outdoor terrace with a view of the surrounding area, features a series of stacked forms offset and alternating to help bring daylight into the units' common areas.

• According to a Washington City Paper report, the residence is the district's premier permanent supportive housing project for homeless veterans and the country's first to have full-time Veterans Affairs case managers in-house. Veterans can pay 30% of their income as rent — a figure which affords them other on-site support in the form of mental health counseling and job and education advisers.

Dive Insight:

DC officials have upped efforts to house homeless vets amid a property boom in the city that has seen housing prices skyrocket, driven largely by young professionals attracted to the Mid-Atlantic’s robust job market.

The widening affordability gap is highlighted by the fact that the city now features the highest rate of homelessness in the country — at more than double the national average — with 124 homeless individuals for every 10,000 residents, according to a recent report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

​City officials are attempting to bridge the gap, with the Council of the District of Columbia approving legislation in December that will levy a tax on apartments in the city’s downtown business improvement district.

Underscoring the blossoming residential construction market in the nation’s capital, a report by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership and CBRE found that more than 14,800 units were under construction or large-scale renovation as of August 2016 compared with 13,294 units a year earlier.

The surge in residential construction activity is even more acute in areas of the city like NoMa and Capitol Riverfront. In December 2016, Toll Brothers’ multifamily business unit and the AECOM Capital investment fund announced they had secured a $130 million construction loan to build a 525-unit luxury apartment in NoMa.

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