NEW YORK CITY-The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT) has invested $134 million of its union pension capital in Penn South Cooperative, at 321 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan. The money will go toward preserving affordability and capital improvements among the complex’s 2,820 housing units.

An intended byproduct of the capital improvements will be the 610 union construction jobs that the planned improvements--heating and air conditioning as well as asbestos remediation--will create during a time when construction industry unemployment is extremely high.

Ted Chandler, COO at HIT, tells GlobeSt.com that the creation of construction jobs is an ongoing initiative for the trust. “We’ve invested close to $200 million of HIT capital in about $350 million’s worth of affordable housing in NYC,” Chandler says. “We started along this path because this is a time of historically high unemployment in the construction trade in particular. This is the Great Depression in the construction industry and we have an obligation to respond.”

In the spring of 2009, HIT set a goal to create 10,000 construction jobs through its investments, a figure it has already surpassed, hitting 11,188 nationally. Equally important in the case of Penn South, of course, was the preservation of the affordable housing units there.

“In New York City, preserving housing units that are affordable to working people is a top priority of ours, and Penn South was an opportunity to improve the living quarters there--to modernize those systems--as well as to extend the affordability,” Chandler says. “It has helped to spark the revitalization of Chelsea and the last thing that we wanted to see was the residents who had made the commitment to improving the neighborhood get priced out of it.”

HIT has “a strong pipeline of major developments” planned in the New York City region, according to Chandler, which includes targeted areas in the boroughs. He anticipates movement on those projects in the coming year. Wells Fargo managing director Thomas Schissler oversaw the financing transaction at Penn South.