William Whitman
Owner and Managing Member, New Community Partners LLC
William Whitman, sole owner and managing member of New Community Partners, has over 30 years of experience in real estate development and finance in both the public and private sectors. Over his career, he has developed and financed over $500 million of multifamily and mixed-use projects and provided planning and consulting services to cities, housing authorities and private clients in 25+ cities in the Eastern United States on projects valued at over $1 billion with over 10,000 units of housing.
Public Sector and Law. William Whitman began his real estate career at the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) from 1980-1988 where he drafted land use regulations to conserve energy use and mitigate environmental impacts, assisted in managing the development of several large residential and commercial projects, administered a $30 million “linkage” fund that subsidized affordable housing, and served as Special Assistant to the Director for Housing Production. During his tenure at the BRA, Mr. Whitman assisted in the management of a variety of Federally-funded projects, including Tent City and Columbia Point. Mr. Whitman went on to practice real estate law and serve as a real estate consultant for institutional clients in the Boston area before joining Telesis Corporation, a national development company focused on large public-private community revitalization projects, in 1995.
Telesis Corporation. During his tenure as General Counsel and then Executive Vice President for Development at Telesis, Mr. Whitman was directly involved in the planning or development of over 3,000 units of mixed-income housing, both new construction and substantial rehabilitation, all financed with complex combinations of public and private funds. For many of Telesis’s projects, he was principally responsible for acquisition, development planning, underwriting, public sector and investor relations, closings, and, for certain projects, oversight of construction and lease up activities. Mr. Whitman also worked briefly for the Special Master for the U.S. District Courts in Yonkers, New York, and Dallas, Texas, in the implementation of housing desegregation decrees entered there to settle Federal housing discrimination suits. This work involved development planning and multifamily acquisitions.
Good examples of Mr. Whitman’s planning and development work for Telesis can be seen on this web site, including: (i) the 450-unit HOPE VI mixed-income housing development in Bradenton, Florida, for which he oversaw development of the master plan and the first phase of financing and construction; (ii) the 200-unit mixed income redevelopment of the 14 acre former John Warner Homes public housing site in downtown Peoria, Illinois and the 407-unit, $30 million tenant-in-place rehabilitation of Carver Terrace. For other projects developed by Telesis in which Mr. Whitman has been involved, go to www.telesiscorp.com.
Mr. Whitman is a managing partner in the $58 million, mixed-use Court Square Center project in the heart of downtown Memphis, Tennessee. This project, now complete and stabilized, consists of the historic rehabilitation of two structures totaling 135,000 gross square feet and the construction of a new 30,000 square foot building that has been certified LEED-Gold. Like many New Community Partners projects, Court Square Center is financed with an array of public and private sources of funding, including: $36 million of New Markets Tax Credit allocation, $7.5 million of Historic Tax Credit equity, an $8.5 million Section 108 loan from the City of Memphis, a $2.0 million Brownfield Economic Development Initiative grant from HUD, $8.0 million of private mortgage financing, $2.9 million of private equity and insurance proceeds resulting from a massive fire that occurred two months after construction started. For more information of Court Square center, please refer to the Projects section of this website or visit www.courtsquarecenter.com.
New Markets Tax Credits. In 2005, Mr. Whitman started Telesis CDE Corporation and secured a $60 million allocation of New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) from the U.S. Department of Treasury, followed by another $25 million allocation in 2010. Mr. Whitman was President of Telesis CDE during that period and oversaw the investment of $60 million of the credits with U.S. Bank and Morgan Stanley.
Somerset Development Company Joint Venture. In 2011, after the development of two single family home ownership projects on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and in New Orleans, Mr. Whitman partnered with long-time colleagues James Campbell and Nancy Hooff at Somerset Development Company in Washington, D.C. to focus on the preservation and redevelopment of affordable, mixed income and market rate housing in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD Metropolitan Areas.
Mr. Whitman received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his J.D. from the University of Western New England School of Law. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association and the American Reinvestment Corporation.
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