Blackbird's 33-story Des Moines tower will include affordable apartments

The apartment tower at the former Younkers building site is scheduled to break ground by Dec. 1.

Joel Aschbrenner
The Des Moines Register

The developers behind Blackbird Tower, a proposed 33-story apartment complex in downtown Des Moines, announced Friday they will set aside 20 percent of the building’s units for low-income renters.

The affordable housing component and other details came to light in a city memo published Friday about the financing of the high-profile development.  

Blackbird is expected to break ground on the $88 million project by December 1, and will receive property tax rebates worth roughly $4.4 million, the city document showed.

Des Moines developer Blackbird Investments wants to break ground this fall on a 26-story apartment complex at Seventh and Walnut Streets.

Justin Doyle, a principal with Blackbird Investments, said he is confident construction can begin before December.

“We think it will actually be earlier than that,” he said. “It’s pretty solid.”

Blackbird Tower is proposed at Seventh and Walnut streets, where the former Younkers department store was destroyed by a massive 2014 fire

It’s one of two residential high-rises proposed downtown. Mandelbaum Properties is working on plans for a 32-story apartment tower with a movie theater, hotel and parking garage at Fifth and Court avenues.

Both projects have generated considerable buzz around Des Moines, which hasn’t seen a 20-plus-story building constructed in more than two decades.

At Blackbird Tower, 68 of the nearly 340 units will be reserved for renters who make less than 50 percent of the local median income. That’s about $28,000 for an individual and about $41,000 for a family of four.

Blackbird plans to obtain low-income housing tax credits to subsidize those units. 

Doyle said the project will provide badly needed affordable housing and demonstrates that such housing can be built without a “crazy amount of incentives.”

“It’s one thing to say yea, yea, yea, we need affordable housing,” he said. “But Blackbird Tower shows we can provide those affordable units within the confines of a development agreement the city is already comfortable with.”

Doyle also touted Blackbird Tower for mixing affordable and market-rate units.

“Affordability doesn’t have to be in these concentrated projects,” he said. “Mixed-income is the future of how we need to structure our living environment downtown.”

Blackbird made waves in May 2016, when it announced it would build an apartment tower at the Younkers site. The firm grabbed even more headlines when it announced the project would include a cantilevered pool jutting out from the top floor of the building.

The hanging pool is still included in the plans, as is a fleet of rentable electric vehicles and a skywalk-attached pocket park.

Des Moines developer Blackbird Investments wants to break ground this fall on a 26-story apartment complex at Seventh and Walnut Streets.

Initially, Blackbird wanted to break ground in fall 2016. But the work to secure loans for the tower pushed well into 2017.

Blackbird now plans to use a Freddie Mac loan backed by the department of Housing and Urban Development. The firm had previously sought a different type of HUD loan that Doyle said offered a more desirable repayment schedule but proved more difficult to obtain.

In a controversial move earlier this year, Blackbird made a last-minute bid to buy the city-owned site where Mandelbaum Properties had proposed its tower. Blackbird’s proposal called for a co-op tower with some affordable units.

Ultimately, the City Council picked Mandelbaum’s proposal, but the experience helped shape Blackbird’s decision to add affordable rental units at its Younkers site tower, Doyle said.