The firm that plans to renovate the former Aeolian apartments on Cherry Street into living space for seniors now plans a similar makeover for the Carr Central building with a broader tenant base in mind.

An application has been filed with the Mississippi Home Corporation for housing tax credits to turn the hulking, three-story structure into the Village Oaks Apartments, planned as a 72-unit complex for multifamily living, said developer Jeremy Mears, of Houston-based Brownstone.

“It’ll be a multifamily development,” Mears said. “The building will remain, and we’ll take the original auditorium and try to keep some remnants in there.”

A public hearing is set for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Jones and Upchurch Realty, 1803 Clay St.

Drawings of floor plans for the complex will be available to view, Mears said. Meanwhile, physical work at the Aeolian has been pushed back to June, when Mears said he should know the building qualifies for additional federal tax credits for refurbishing historic homes. Some form of work had been planned this month.

In September, Brownstone was awarded nearly $750,000 worth of income-based tax credits to defray the project’s $8 million cost.

It’s the fourth concerted effort since 1999 to rehab the building that once housed multiple generations of Vicksburg students. That year, developer Robert Rosenthal bought the old school from the city for $105,000 and envisioned an assisted living facility. The project fizzled when state grants to clean the building weren’t secured and it ran into problems with asbestos.

Webber Brewer purchased Carr in 2007 and planned upscale units or condos dubbed “The Carr.” Then, in 2009, The Landmark Group, a North Carolina development company, proposed purchasing the school and turning it into a 58-unit, $8.6 million senior apartment complex, but that plan fell through. Brewer died in February 2010.

Last year, developers from Arizona and Illinois proposed a 62-unit senior apartments billed as The Rose of Vicksburg, financed with housing tax credits aimed at lower-income seniors where rent is paid on a sliding scale based on income. The group competed with Brownstone’s application at the Aeolian and two others in Vicksburg and Warren County. Brownstone won the credits based on a 132 score on its application — highest among 14 proposals awarded more than $6.5 million in affordable tax credits in Mississippi for 2011 — though paperwork submitted for Carr scored a 118, the highest of the 21 applications rejected.

Carr closed in 1979 after it functioned as a junior high school for 21 years. It served as Carr Central High School from 1932 to 1958, when it was replaced by H.V. Cooper High School. The structure was built in 1924 and named for John P. Carr, the superintendent of Vicksburg schools at the time.

Housing tax credits administered annually by MHC fund residential developments where the sliding-scale rent is based on a county’s area median income. The program provides credits or reductions in tax liability each year for 10 years for owners and investors in affordable-income rental housing, based on the costs of development and the number of qualified affordable-income units.

Under the tax credit program people eligible to live in a complex built and financed with affordable housing tax credits must earn less than 60 percent of the area median income. In Warren County, that comes to about $30,855, using the most recent income-related census data.