Bank of America | New Markets Tax Credit Coalition

Atlantic Avenue Industrial Center

Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC) renovated a 50,000 square foot industrial building to create a manufacturing facility for several small-scale manufacturers. Located in Crown Heights Brooklyn just a few blocks from public transportation, the facility provides affordable space, for woodworkers, custom frame builders, metal workers, ceramic artists, and other artisanal trades. The renovated facility will achieve LEED Silver certification.

CASA Multicultural Center

CASA de Maryland, Inc. (CASA), Maryland’s largest advocacy group for Latinos and immigrants, redeveloped the historic McCormick-Goodhart Mansion in Langley Park, Md., into the CASA Multicultural Center. The new center will allows CASA to double the number of beneficiaries the organization can serves each year from 3,000 to 6,000 and consolidated most of its staff into one location. CASA will also subleted 400 square feet of the new space to four of its non-profit nonprofit partner organizations.

Remington Row 1

Remington Row is a 250,000 square foot mixed-use, new construction project in the heart of the Remington neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the first of several, planned redevelopment projects along three adjacent blocks, designed to fill a need for community services, retail and reasonably-priced apartments and to catalyze further investment in the neighborhood. The building features a 30,000 square foot health clinic, 15,000 square feet of retail, 108 apartments, and three floors of underground parking. The apartments are priced below-market, and 20 percent of the units are affordable to families earning less than 80 percent of area median income.

KIPP Jacksonville

The Knowledge Is Power Program (“KIPP”) charter schools is a national network of three, not-for-profit open enrollment charter schools with a renowned track record of preparing students from our nation’s most educationally undeserved communities for success in college and life. The overall project consisted of the redevelopment of a former greyhound racing track clubhouse into educational space for the eventual operation of three KIPP schools. Jacksonville Alliance for KIPP Schools, Inc. (“JAKS”) was gifted the site located at 1440 N. McDuff Road, Jacksonville, FL 32254 for the purpose of developing the KIPP schools and to lease the property to KIPP Jacksonville Schools, another recently-created, non -profit entity whose sole purpose is to build and manage the schools. The clubhouse was over 150,000 square feet in space, which is large enough to house three KIPP schools with a total of 37 classrooms. Plans for the fourth floor are pending. In total, approximately 1,180 students will be served through the renovations, which took place from January 2010 to November 2010. KIPP Impact Middle School opened in August 2010 and serves approximately 340 students. In subsequent years, a second middle school and an elementary school are planned to be opened in the building, which will serve 340 and 500 students, respectively. At full occupancy, the facility serves approximately 1,180 students from kindergarten through 7th grade.

HealthRIGHT 360

HealthRIGHT 360’s project involved the acquisition and renovation of a 48,000 square foot building in the heart of San Francisco. The new building opened its doors in 2017 as an integrated health care center for low-income and safety-net patients, offering a comprehensive array of services including primary medical and chronic disease treatment, dentistry, mental health services, substance use disorder treatment services that address the social determinants of health (housing, employment, education, computer literacy and wellness), and a low-cost pharmacy. The facility includes 30,000 square feet of medical space which includes dental services and a pharmacy, 10,000 square feet of mental health and social service space and 10,000 square feet of administrative space.

Asian American Drug Abuse Program

AADAP is a nonprofit 501[c] [3] corporation established in 1972. During the last 35 years, the organization has grown with the changing needs of its community by broadening its scope of services from drug abuse prevention/treatment to include HIV/AIDS outreach, drug court and parenting services. The company has experienced an increased demand for its products and required additional facilities to support to effective deliver services in the South Los Angeles community; additionally, it wanted to lower its borrowing costs. Loan proceeds were used to acquire a 22,500 square foot office building in South Los Angeles and consolidate existing loans used to acquire two other office buildings totaling 40,000 square feet utilized for AADAPs social services programs.

The Gateway Family YMCA – Elizabeth Branch

The Elizabeth Branch impacts the community it serves by nurturing the potential of every child, teaching the importance of spirit, mind, and body to achieve a healthier lifestyle and supporting its neighbors to learn life skills that will help them grow and thrive. The Elizabeth Branch serves Elizabeth and the surrounding communities, and provides The Dudley House Veterans Transitional Housing Program in Plainfield, NJ.

TDC Cutting Tools aka Greenfield Industries

TDC Cutting Tools, Inc., one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cutting tools, established its overseas headquarters in Oconee County, S.C. at the same site as its subsidiary, Greenfield Industries. The company invested $11.7 million in the construction of a 47,000-sq.-ft. campus, including a 32,000-sq.-ft. office building and a 15,000-sq.-ft. high-speed metals recycling facility. The recycling facility’s purpose is to enable sustainable solutions in the metal recycling industry that reduce solid materials waste. It permits Greenfield to tap into an existing flow of steel scrap to which its strategic partners are highly connected, and it helps ensure additional steel scrap metal will be reprocessed rather than disposed of in landfills. Together, both companies employ more than 3,300 individuals worldwide and produce more than 300 million tools annually.

Halsey Street Teachers Village Workforce Housing A

The $64 million Halsey Street Workforce Housing project was the second phase of a larger Teachers Village development designed to revitalize downtown Newark, one of the country’s most economically depressed cities. This phase of development contains three buildings with 123 residential units, all affordable to families earning less than 80% of the area median income, and 28,000 square feet of retail space. The housing and a new grocery store are intended to help attract teachers and other working families back to the city to help reverse the long-term middle-class exodus. The larger Teachers Village development includes a school and a child care facility.

Voormi

BACKGROUND Pagosa Springs is a 2,000 resident southern Colorado town nestled in the San Juan Mountain range and surrounded by two million acres of national forest. Local median income is one-half of the Colorado average and poverty levels are 60% higher than the national average. In 2010, a former technology industry employee chose this rural location to launch VOORMI, a company that is reinventing the model for domestic textile and apparel manufacturing.

VOORMI’S STRATEGY

The company’s name was inspired by the Vormi, an obscure animal from ancient Greek mythology. As legend has it, the furry, three-toed beasts roamed the brutal ice and snow and survived by finding novel ways to adapt to the conditions. Accordingly, Dan English, VOORMI’s founder, decided to focus on adapting a business model around domestic competitive advantages in the textile industry rather than disadvantages. While working with veteran apparel designers from GORE-TEX and Polartec, his team studied the special characteristics of wool from high elevations in the Rocky Mountains. VOORMI designer Doug Lumb told Company Week Magazine in 2017, “The sheep see temperature extremes in a day of 30-plus degrees. They grow a wool that’s a little ‘crimp-ier’ than wool grown in a maritime climate.”

VOORMI’S GROWTH

VOORMI was launched in 2010 with funding from the founder along with his family and friends. Consistent with VOORMI’s original philosophy, every aspect of garment production occurs with American workers and suppliers. Furthermore, VOORMI reduces both its carbon footprint and its freight costs by sourcing its wool locally from ranches in the Rockies. VOORMI successfully released initial product lines, including outdoor hoodies and water-resistant woolmix outer layers. In order to produce the garments, the company provided low-income community residents in some of the most underserved communities of the country with technical seamstress job training and benefits. Pursuant to VOORMI’s strategy, the garments were sewn in rural factories, thereby transforming rural communities into small manufacturing hubs.

FINANCING CHALLENGE

Although VOORMI experienced initial success, the company exhausted cash reserves as they managed the investment required to sustain growth. By 2018, VOORMI like many small businesses needed additional capital to produce inventory for existing orders and purchase equipment for critical product expansions. The company was challenged by insufficient cash flow and collateral to support additional borrowing from traditional banks. Without funding, VOORMI’s continued operations were at risk.

NEW MARKETS TAX CREDITS FUEL VOORMI’S GROWTH AND JOB CREATION

Greenline Community Ventures, a Colorado CDFI and national CDE, connected with VOORMI through one of Greenline’s local financing relationships that was familiar with both the company and Greenline’s Small Business Capital Fund. In 2016, Greenline Community Ventures used New Markets Tax Credits to create a Small Business Capital Fund designed specifically to help create low-income community jobs by funding high impact, cash flow challenged small businesses. The Fund’s mission is to better connect low-income community residents with the small businesses that represent two-thirds of America’s job growth. By leveraging New Markets Tax Credits, Greenline was able to provide VOORMI with a $1.95 million loan subordinate to all of the company’s existing debt obligations. The loan provided the company with critical working capital to increase inventory, purchase equipment, and significantly expand its manufacturing, marketing, and product development capacity at its Pagosa Springs headquarters. According to Patrick Vahey, President of Greenline, “Small businesses with under 50 employees continue to struggle to find the funds required to effectively operate and grow – especially in low-income communities. By combining New Markets Tax Credits with private capital sources, Greenline is able to provide patient, equity-like funding to lowincome community businesses that have been rejected by other capital sources. We want to help potential high impact businesses remain in low-income communities and hire low-income residents, thereby allowing these residents to avoid being displaced as broader redevelopment occurs. We want to reduce the impact of gentrification by improving the connection between small business employment opportunities and low-income community residents.” Greenline created the Small Business Capital Fund to improve the flow of capital in underserved communities through loans to ranging from $200,000 to $2 million. The fund prioritizes investments that create quality jobs for local residents, support minority or women business ownership, generate environmental benefits, and promote employee training advancement from unskilled to skilled positions.

IMPACT OF GREENLINE’S NMTC INVESTMENT

VOORMI is a rare success story in an American textile and apparel manufacturing landscape littered with closed plants and failed businesses that once drove local economies. Greenline’s funding is allowing VOORMI to continue to create high paying jobs in small town economies. Today, VOORMI is expanding to 14 employees in Pagosa Springs. The company owns five patents on its wool-blends, and its intellectually property is gaining interest from investors for uses beyond apparel. “We are also proud to be Colorado-based and American made. One of our main objectives is to keep production in the USA and provide jobs in small towns,” said VOORMI CEO Dan English. “We’d much rather a few folks in some mountain hideaway who understand the VOORMI lifestyle produce our products than an obscure behemoth facility in a faraway land. This also allows us to operate with a very small carbon footprint and mitigate waste by ensuring that every functional piece of fabric is used.”