An Opportunity to Turn Historic Officer's Quarters into Housing for Veterans
Section 106 Success Story: Fort Whipple Housing (Prescott, Arizona)
Fort Whipple is a National Historic Landmark in Prescott with a long military history and a collection of historic buildings that help tell the story of the federal government’s presence in northern Arizona. Among them are vacant historic officers’ quarters that represented both a preservation challenge and an opportunity.
The Project
The Northern Arizona VA Health Care System proposed a project to provide affordable housing for veterans through a combination of new construction and adaptive reuse of historic officers’ quarters within the Fort Whipple Historic District.
photo by: Arizona SHPO
Six stately Victorian Buildings built between 1904-1906 have been converted into 30 units of Veterans Housing as part of the larger 80-unit veterans affordable housing project known as The Post.
The project ultimately envisioned an 80-unit apartment complex that would house more than 100 currently homeless veterans. But the project faced a serious timing challenge. Delays in federal agency accountability and consultation with the Yavapai Prescott Tribe compressed the Section 106 review schedule because the developer needed to meet funding requirements.
The Section 106 Process
Rather than allowing the compressed schedule to force preservation concerns aside, SHPO facilitated an unusually collaborative process.
SHPO, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the VA, and the Yavapai Prescott Tribe participated in “real-time” agreement-document writing sessions. The goal was to develop a Section 106 agreement that could address the project’s effects without requiring the normal 30-day review period by consulting parties.
The approach allowed the parties to work through issues together rather than sequentially.
What We Would Have Lost
Section 106 consultation for this project facilitated critical funding that enabled the developer to maximize the number of housing units, while at the same time providing for long-term stewardship of six buildings highly significant to the United States' military history.
The Success
In less than 60 days, SHPO helped move the project from a determination of adverse effect to execution of a Programmatic Agreement, allowing the developer to secure its financial commitments.
The project is now under construction and includes adaptive reuse of six historic officers’ quarters, along with new construction of the 80-unit apartment complex.
The result is more than a preservation success. It is a housing success, a veterans’ services success, and a tribal consultation success. Once completed, the project will provide the only veterans housing serving the rural and tribal communities of northern Arizona.
