Middlesex County Improvement Authority New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange – H-3 Project

Transaction Summary

RBC Capital Markets served as Senior and Sole Bookrunning Manager on the Middlesex County Improvement Authority’s 11-tranche offering totaling $450,890,000 across Middlesex County Lease Bonds, Middlesex County Tax Credit Bonds and Residential Tax Credit Bonds, Rutgers GO Lease Bonds and Multifamily Housing Bonds (collectively, the “Bonds”). The proceeds of the Bonds are being used to finance a portion of H-3 @ The New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange (the “HELIX”) – a 39-story, 554,000 square-foot transformative mixed-use development project in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. H3 @ the HELIX was also awarded more than $359 million in New Jersey Aspire Tax Credits, for which RBC Community Investments served as syndicator. The sale proceeds from the Aspire state tax credits serve as the primary source of repayment for several of the bond series. Finally, H3 @ the HELIX includes an affordable housing residential component with 20% of the units income restricted which qualifies the residential portion of the project for the federal 4% Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. RBC Community Investments is actively evaluating the opportunity to syndicate these federal tax credits at a future date.

Summary of Terms

County Lease Bonds / Tax Credit Bonds

Residential Tax Credit Bonds

Rutgers GO Lease Bonds

Multifamily Housing Bonds

Borrowers Overview

DHA and H3RUR are both New Jersey limited liability companies and joint ventures of New Brunswick Development Corporation (“DEVCO”) and Pennrose Holdings, LLC. DEVCO was established in 1976 as a New Jersey nonprofit and federal 501(c)(3) not-for-profit development company to initiate redevelopment projects and to serve as the redevelopment vehicle for public and private investment in residential, commercial, office and other real estate projects in a publicly beneficial manner within the City of New Brunswick and the State of New Jersey generally. Since its creation, DEVCO has overseen and managed over $4 billion of redevelopment construction activity. Pennrose Holdings, LLC is an affiliate of Pennrose LLC (“Pennrose”). Pennrose is a nationally recognized affordable housing developer and manager, whose mission is to improve the lives of working families by creating safe, secure housing communities where residents can build fulfilling lives. Since 1971, Pennrose has completed the development of more than 27,000 rental housing units and roughly $4 billion in total development.

Aspire Program

The New Jersey Aspire Program is a gap-financing tax incentive program administered by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority that encourages commercial, mixed-use, and residential real estate development across the state. Created under the Economic Recovery Act of 2020 and revised in January 2025 (Aspire 3.0), it replaces the earlier Economic Redevelopment and Growth Program by providing one-time transferable tax credits equal to a percentage of a projects eligible costs, directly addressing financing gaps that make redevelopment projects economically unfeasible without incentives.

H3 @ the HELIX qualified for Aspire Tax Credits under the “Transformative Projects” designation as a qualified residential transformative project. In addition to certain minimum criteria pertaining to project cost, scope and number of residential units, the project is required to reserve at least 20% of the residential units constructed for occupancy by low- and moderate-income households with affordability controls as adopted by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, in consultation with the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. Transformative Projects can receive awards up to $400 million or 80-85% of project costs depending on project location, up to a total program cap of 10 projects (H-1 was the first and H-3 was the seventh approved Transformative Project). No more than two Transformative Project awards can be made within a single municipality.

Transaction Overview

H3 @ the HELIX is a 39-story, 554,530 square foot, mixed-use high-rise tower and the third phase of a three-building development in downtown New Brunswick. Once all three buildings are complete, HELIX will comprise 1.5 million square feet of multifaceted, state-of-the-art environments supporting the gamut of health and life science organizations and professions. The components of H3 include the following:

• County Office Space – The County will relocate their C-Suite office, other administrative offices, and public and business facing departments to engage and support The HELIX ecosystem. The combined office space will be more than 141,000 square feet;
• Dry Laboratory Space – The County is sponsoring dry lab space totaling approximately 29,460 square feet for small- and medium-sized pharmaceutical, fin-tech, deep-tech and bio-tech companies, and over time, this space will be available to companies of the New Jersey Innovation HUB in H-1;
• Rutgers School of Engineering Facilities – Rutgers WINLAB and ESRG will occupy approximately 33,100 square feet of specialized wireless network test rooms and research space;
• Rutgers Student Housing – Complementing the development of the state-of-the-art medical school facility for the reconstituted Rutgers School of Medicine in H-1, four floors, spanning approximately 51,600 square feet will be dedicated to student housing with space for 98 medical students; and
• Residential Tower – The Residences @ HELIX will be a mixed-income apartment tower constructed atop the podium, occupying floors 12-39, spanning approximately 299,000 square feet and will have 265 total units, with 20% reserved for low-income affordable housing.