NORTHAMPTON — After more than three years of planning and construction, Danielle McKahn, of Northampton, has completed development of nine single-family homes on the newly created Paintbox Lane, off Day Avenue.
The new development features a mix of four one-and-a-half-bedroom units —each with a small room equipped with a Murphy bed — one four-bedroom unit and four two-bedroom units spanning the half-acre lot behind a former single-family home at 39 Day Ave.
McKahn, an urban planner by trade, began the local, small-scale real estate development company Pioneer Development in 2008. Since the company’s inception, McKahn said she has renovated, rented out and sold duplexes and single-family homes. She added that the Paintbox Lane development is her largest project yet; her second-largest was an eight-unit development at 227 South St.
“We pretty much started out house hacking, which is where you live in one unit in a multifamily, fix it up, and then move to the other, and fix it up,” McKahn said. “I got started with this small Western Mass Small Developers network … I acknowledge that this is no longer exactly small scale, but we’ve done lots of small-scale [projects], and it’s small compared to what bigger developers are doing. But it aims to connect more people who are interested in real estate.”
Each of the development’s four townhomes includes a small back patio with a small stretch of green space, along with a washer and dryer and other modern amenities. McKahn said three of the four one-and-a-half-bedroom apartments have already been rented.
Each of the seven, two-story buildings lining Paintbox Lane is equipped with an AeroBarrier system, which disseminates silicone particles into the air to seal pores and cracks in each home to make them more energy efficient.
“Once you make your houses super tight, we use a technology called AeroBarrier, which is like living in the future. They put an aerosolized gel and a negative pressure into the air with these little microgel particles,” she said. “They put a negative pressure on the building, they keep running the negative pressure, and they’re also simultaneously running a blower door test to test how tight the buildings are.”
The lot comprises two units in the existing house, four single-family townhouses, a single-family home and a duplex. Rental rates for the one-bedroom units, McKahn said, start at $2,300 per month, while the two-bedroom units start at $2,850 per month.
Planning Board approval for the project came in 2024, following what McKahn described as a yearlong planning process.
Acknowledging that she is a small developer in a market usually comprising large, well-established property development firms, McKahn credited Pioneer Development’s success to changes made to Northampton’s zoning ordinances that facilitate the creation of denser housing.
“The zoning changes that the city of Northampton has made have been really positive. They’ve allowed for small infill development,” McKahn said. “We’ve seen a lot of it around town, and it’s not always this big in scale — it’ll be someone breaking up a lot and a second house going up where there was a double-wide lot — Northampton has really provided a lot of leadership, in showing how you can revise these old zoning codes that are totally outdated and no longer appropriate.”
