NORTHAMPTON — Former state hospital property up at Village Hill bustles with construction, but one large piece of the planned puzzle has so far been missing: roughly 30 acres of undeveloped land on the north side of the neighborhood.
But if new and approved plans for a $19 million residential project come to fruition, that could soon change.
MassDevelopment, charged with selling the state-owned parcels, chose a developer last week to take over Village Hill’s last major residential venture. The Community Builders plans to build 65 mixed-income rental units on 29 acres in collaboration with Valley Community Development Corp.
“This project is an important final phase for the overall Village Hill development, though there are still some smaller parcels that are being developed individually,” Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz said Monday.
The Community Builders, lead developer, also plans to create 2,500 square feet of commercial space on two separate parcels.
And a group of prospective residents, from whom the previous developer took deposits, will retain 5 acres of the north end of Village Hill for an intended cohousing project. They have seven months to find a new developer for that project, MassDevelopment said in statement released Monday. MassDevelopment also plans to keep one acre of its own to develop five single-family units.
The land was previously slated for development last year by Transformations Inc., but that project fell through in November after the company failed to secure financing and later filed for bankruptcy. Prospective buyers who paid about $15,000 each in deposits ended up on company owner Robert Carter Scott’s list of creditors.
“Hopefully, the next developer will be able to work with them on their deposits,” he said in a November interview.
Rachana Crowley, senior project manager for The Community Builders, said the company helped kick off development at Village Hill with a mixed-income project. The newest residential plan will be the nonprofit’s third development in the burgeoning neighborhood.
“We’re excited to bring this mixed-income component back to the site,” Crowley said.
Laura Baker, real estate project manager for Valley CDC, said specifics of the two nonprofits’ collaboration still need fine tuning.
“We are still kind of working out the details of who’s going to do what,” she said. “We’re really early, and things are still in the conceptual phase.”
But the mutual goals, Crowley and Baker said, are clear. The planned residential project will be designed with accessibility and efficiency in mind. Baker said current plans, which are subject to change, include eight units in the affordable range, 27 targeting low-to-middle-income earners, and then 30 units in a tier designed for the city’s workforce. For a two-person household, the bottom tier would be for those earning about $20,000 or less, $40,000 or less in the middle tier and then about $80,000 or less in the third tier.
“So this is a pretty big range,” she said. “That should capture pretty much everyone in the Northampton rental market. That’s the goal — to really have an economic mix.”
Baker said they hope to have designs in order in time to apply for funding by next spring.
“This is a really important housing type for Northampton, when we talk about trying to create housing at different levels of the income ladder,” Narkewicz said, explaining that prospective residents who make slightly above the median $33,000 annually often get “priced out” of the Northampton housing market. “They’re really trying to target an area of the market where there’s a need.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.