Forty-Six Front Doors on East Castle Street, and a Lawn in the Middle

The thing to understand about Parkside Apartments is that it is not shaped like public housing. That is the point of it.

The development that opened on East Castle Street — the Tennessee Housing Development Agency and the Murfreesboro Housing Authority held the ribbon-cutting on July 30 — is 46 units spread across six buildings on about 2.78 acres, next to Patterson Park. The buildings are two-story rowhouses arranged around a shared central green, with sidewalks running through it, a playground, landscaped common areas, grilling space and a computer room for residents.

The unit mix is worth reading closely, because it tells you who this was built for: eight one-bedrooms, 20 two-bedrooms, 16 three-bedrooms and two four-bedrooms. More than half the development is three bedrooms or larger. That is not a studio-and-one-bedroom building aimed at the cheapest possible cost per door. It is family housing, and family housing is the hardest kind to make the math work on.

How the math actually worked

It took three separate sources stacked on top of each other:

• $10.5 million in equity raised through federal low-income housing tax credits awarded by THDA
• $600,000 from THDA's Tennessee Housing Trust Fund
• A $12 million community development loan from Fifth Third Bank

That is more than $23 million in combined equity, grant and debt for 46 homes — roughly half a million dollars a unit, in a county where land and construction costs have been climbing for a decade. Anyone who wonders why affordable housing does not simply get built faster can find most of the answer in that stack. No single one of those three sources could have done it alone, and assembling all three takes years of application cycles before a shovel moves.

Present for the opening were Ralph M. Perrey, executive director of THDA; Marquisha Griffin, executive director of the Murfreesboro Housing Authority; and Dave Briggs, Tennessee regional president for Fifth Third Bank. The architecture is by MHM Architects + Interior Designers.

One piece of a much longer project

Parkside is not a one-off. The Murfreesboro Housing Authority has been working through a master plan, developed in 2019 and shaped by public input sessions in early 2021, to replace its aging mid-century properties rather than patch them. Oakland Court and the Mercury Court property have moved through the same pipeline. The financing tool underneath much of it is the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which lets housing authorities convert older public housing into a form that can attract private capital — which is precisely how a Fifth Third loan ends up in the capital stack of a public housing replacement.

Residents in MHA housing pay 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities. That figure does not change because the building is new. What changes is what the 30 percent buys: an insulated envelope instead of uninsulated block, a bedroom for each child instead of a shared one, and a front door onto a lawn instead of a parking bay.

Why the shape matters

Mid-century public housing in American cities was built on a particular theory — density, shared corridors, buildings turned inward, parking at the perimeter. It was cheap to build and it aged badly, and the design itself became part of what people meant when they used the phrase “the projects.”

Everything about Parkside's plan is a deliberate argument against that theory. Rowhouses with individual entrances instead of shared halls. Six smaller buildings instead of a few large ones. A green in the middle that the homes face, rather than a lot. Sidewalks that connect to the neighborhood instead of ending at the property line. It reads, from the street, like any other new development in Murfreesboro — which for the people living in it is not a cosmetic detail. It is the difference between an address you explain and an address you just give.

Its neighbor is Patterson Park, which is one of the busier pieces of city recreation infrastructure in Murfreesboro — the community center there runs indoor programming through the week, and its outdoor courts are open daily from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Putting 46 families, most of them with children, directly beside that is the kind of siting decision that does not make headlines and quietly does a great deal of work.