After a $300 thousand donation, the Todmorden Foundation can continue working toward its goal to create more than 450 residential units in The Flats.
The new donation from the Tsionas Management Company will go toward redeveloping 60 low-income apartments that will be marketed toward people with disabilities and seniors.
Todmorden President and CEO Richard Przywara said The Flats were established before World War I, and it’s Todmorden’s goal to rebuild them now that the buildings have reached the end of their useful lives.
He said that’s a complicated process.
“We have to break it into three different time periods – we have to relocate the people that are living there,” Przywara said. “It's not like these are completely vacant and we can just tear them down any day we want.”
Przywara said the housing shortage in Wilmington makes it so his team has to tackle the redevelopment process piece by piece to ensure residents still have housing as each phase is completed.
What makes this phase of the project unique is its partnership between Tsionas, a for-profit company, and Todmorden, a non-profit, according to Przywara.
“For-profit developers should partner up with a nonprofit, so that every time people are doing market rate development, they should turn to a nonprofit and say, ‘I'm also going to invest with you to help build affordable housing,’” Przywara said. “‘You do it better, that's your area of expertise.’”
The 60 apartments will aim to house seniors, young people just out of school and people with disabilities in Delaware.
“We know that we need 20 thousand affordable housing units to meet the unmet demand,” Przywara said. “People are house sharing, they're couch surfing, they're living in conditions that are less than ideal. And people want a safe, affordable home. It is the bedrock of a life.”
Przywara added the affordable units will offer people stability and open doors to more help, like food stamps and benefits checks that become more accessible when someone has a reliable home address.
Construction for this phase of the project will start January 2027 and is expected to be completed May 2028.
