Meet the Member: Nick Bouquet, Evergreen Partners Housing

Nick Bouquet’s company, Evergreen Partners Housing, is devoted to acquiring, renovating, and operating large affordable-housing developments.

Evergreen Partners currently owns and operates over 40 affordable housing properties in 15 states with the mission, said Nick, of modernizing older properties to upgrade not only the physical aspects but uplift the lives of the people who reside in them.

“We don’t buy to flip, we buy to own and operate for the long term and run professionally,” he said.

Nick joined Evergreen Partners eight years ago as a development associate and joined the firm as a principal in 2016.

There was a time when Nick made the commute from his Portsmouth home to South Portland, Maine, where Evergreen is based.

“I was living here and driving to South Portland every day,” he said. But Portsmouth, he said, “is just where I want to be and the commute was wearing on me.”

After several years of making the daily commute to Maine, he and his partners agreed to his telecommuting, which he did initially from office space he sublet in Portsmouth. The space was a temporary solution but it did not fit his need of finding a functional, professional and affordable workspace in Portsmouth.

That is until the Cooperative Venture Workspace became available at 36 Maplewood Avenue, Portsmouth.

The Class A office space at the Workspace offers a variety of memberships and amenities to fit the needs of professionals looking for flexible workspace.

“Portsmouth is a challenging place to find workspace if you are a one or two or three-person business,” said Nick. “I wanted a more professional environment and COVE filled that need for me. My transition here has been seamless from where I was before.”

A 2005 graduate of Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., Nick did internships in construction and in venture capital investing during college. He worked for a venture capital firm for a few years before joining Evergreen in 2007.

From the Workspace, he helps run the business that endeavors to accomplish three primary goals: Preserve existing affordable housing where people currently live by recapitalizing the property and completing substantial interior and exterior renovations, enhancing the lives of those residents through improved physical conditions, professional management and residential services programming, and by extending any rental subsidies made available by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to Nick, HUD can terminate a property’s rental subsidy program if the housing falls into disrepair. The HUD rental subsidy program is the primary mechanism that allows low-income families and seniors access to high quality rental housing. Loss of those subsidies is detrimental to those families and the affordable housing resources within a community.

Typically, said Nick, renovations run about $35,000 to $55,000 per apartment and most of Evergreen’s projects involve larger properties with 100 or more units being preserved at a given time. Typically everything from the major building systems (windows/roof/heating and cooling) to anything the tenant’s see and touch in the apartment is “fully refreshed and modernized,” said Nick.

While there are challenges to rehabbing a building where people are living, Nick said the company takes great pains to communicate with and prepare tenants for the construction, that, while temporarily inconvenient, will provide them with refurbished homes for many years to come.

“Many of the tenants are people that have a deep sense of pride in the communities they live in and that increases with the renovations,” said Nick.