Global Awards News

LONDON: Multigenerational communities are now being created in rehabilitated mixed use buildings on regeneration sites in the core of cities.

After wrapping up a trifecta of housing rehabs in Richmond, a Maryland-based developer is returning to the city’s Northside with more apartments in the works for the Six Points area.

Enterprise Community Development has filed plans for a four-story building with 43 apartments and ground-floor commercial space on a roughly half-acre lot at 1203 E. Brookland Park Blvd.

The vacant lot is next door to the old Highland Park Public School, which Enterprise converted into 77 apartments for low-income seniors as the first in a trio of projects it’s completed to provide replacement housing for residents of Gilpin Court’s Fay Towers.

The site is also across the street from where Enterprise is planning a 76-unit apartment building at 1218-1228 E. Brookland Park Blvd. That project, which would replace two dilapidated houses and a vacant church complex, received city approval five years ago but has yet to move forward.

Like that project, the 43-unit building would involve income-based apartments, with at least half of them rented to households at or below 50 percent of the area median income. The rest of the primarily one- and two-bedroom units would range in rent from 40 to 80 percent AMI, according to documents filed with the city.

In Richmond, 50 percent AMI equates to $31,300 a year for an individual or $35,800 for a two-person household, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Eighty percent AMI equates to $50,050 and $57,200, respectively.

The 60,000-square-foot building would also include up to 3,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, along with 2,600 square feet of amenity space for residents. The L-shaped building would line the corner of Brookland Park Boulevard and Woodcliff Avenue, with 36 off-street parking spaces behind it.

The commercial space is intended for “businesses that fill community needs that are not currently present in the neighborhood,” according to the project’s application for a special-use permit. The permit is needed to allow the commercial space allotment and the building’s fourth story, as the property’s zoning restricts heights to three stories.

Local Roth Jackson attorneys Mark Kronenthal and Jennifer Mullen are representing Enterprise in its request, which was introduced at the City Council meeting last week. The Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the request at its April 4 meeting.

Kronenthal’s application letter mentions the adjacent Highland Park Senior Apartments, describing the proposed apartments as building off that project’s momentum.

“The quality, affordable senior housing on the adjacent property to the east has been a catalyst in the area,” the letter states, “but in order for more stable businesses to locate in the central Six Points area as an amenity to the greater area, more multi-family residential density must occur…”

The Highland Park project was the first of three that Enterprise — previously known as Community Preservation and Development Corp. — completed with the Richmond Redevelopment & Housing Authority for its Fay Towers rehousing effort. The other projects included a mixed-use development in Jackson Ward and a conversion of the former Baker Public School that wrapped up last year.

Enterprise has enlisted architecture firm Quinn Evans to design the 43-unit Brookland Park building. Richmond-based Timmons Group is the engineer.

Enterprise purchased the 0.6-acre lot in September for $260,000, city property records show. The previously improved lot had been owned by Barbara Pinchback, whose late husband, Melford Pinchback, had owned it since at least the mid-1990s. The city most recently assessed the land at $194,000.

The company has not announced a timeline for the 76-unit project, which Kronenthal said is still in the works. A representative said the company declined to comment on either project at this time.

The plans add to other efforts to revitalize the Six Points corridor, so named for the six-armed intersection formed by the convergence of Brookland Park Boulevard, Meadowbridge Road, and Second and Dill avenues.

Late last year, local nonprofit HandUp Community Resource Center was selected to convert the former Bank of America branch at 1307 E. Brookland Park Blvd. into a community pharmacy.