Mental health clinic plans to sell affordable apartments

MISSOULA (AP) — The Western Montana Mental Health Center is selling two apartment buildings in Missoula that provide affordable housing for people living with mental illness or whose only income is disability payments, center CEO Levi Anderson said.

The agency wants to focus on its clinical programs instead of managing real estate, he said.

Because construction of the buildings was funded with federal and state grants and low-interest loans, there was a period of time when they were required to be rented to people who met certain income qualifications, said Patty Kent, the center's former housing and development director.

Those requirements have expired and the apartments could be turned into market-rate housing as rents continue rise because of short supply, the Missoulian reported.

Anderson said the center was unable to find a buyer who would continue to operate the apartments as low-income housing, so they have been listed for sale. The 20-unit building is listed at $2.19 million and the four-unit building is for sale for $525,000.

The center's board of directors evaluated whether offering supportive housing fit into the scope of the organization's core mission and they concludced that they are not experts in being landlords or property managers, Anderson said,

"Our services support individuals experiencing serious mental illness, substance abuse and addiction, and that's where we really need to be strong as an organization on focusing our expertise and clinical programs," Anderson said.

He declined to say how many people live in the apartments and could not say how many other properties the center manages, but described the holdings as a "tremendous volume of residential living facilities" plus some group homes.

Kent said she and her staff built a 20-unit apartment building in 1998 using 14 different grants and $20,000 in Tax Increment Financing.

At the time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had a model to move people from homelessness to transitional housing and then to permanent housing, Kent said.

"I said, that's stupid, nobody likes to move. Let's just move them into permanent housing and wrap them in services. We won a national award for innovation," she said.

The agency built the four-unit building using a low-interest loan from the Montana Board of Housing, paying off the mortgage with the rents charged, she said.