The Bornstein & Pearl Building in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester was a meat processing facility and major employer in the community for 60 years. When Pearl Meats shut its doors in 2007, those jobs vanished and the building remained vacant for nearly a decade.
A flexible predevelopment and acquisition loan from BlueHub Loan Fund, followed by construction financing in a leveraged New Market Tax Credits structure one year later, allowed Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation to acquire the building and lease the rehabbed space to CommonWealth Kitchen, an incubator for food-based businesses. The loan from BlueHub Loan Fund helped Dorchester Bay and CommonWealth Kitchen put this light manufacturing facility back to use and supported opportunities for food entrepreneurs whose production costs might otherwise be prohibitive to getting their businesses off the ground.
