Across the street from Rockefeller Park, the vine-covered Linnette Apartments, 1552 Ansel Ave., was demolished several months ago for a mixed-income apartment building. Just beyond the two lighter-shaded facades of the Regency Square Apartments, on either side of Kenmore Avenue, two other apartment buildings in bad condition were knocked down in the last few years (Google). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Several more projects moving forward
Multiple construction projects are underway at the east end of Hough, closest to University Circle, and more are about to begin. While work is rapidly progressing on the apartments and townhomes for Park Lamont, two more projects are about to begin and a third is waiting in the wings for more financing to be awarded to it. All are in response to the growing number of University Circle-area jobs and students. Even affordable senior housing is being added in response to this growth, with the goal to make sure seniors don’t get squeezed out of a neighborhood experiencing rising rents.
Two proposed projects whose designs were recently approved by the City Planning Commission are moving forward. Of them, the most imminent appears to be the Chester 82 development by Marous Development Group of Willoughby. Located at 1898 E. 82nd St., at the northwest corner of Chester Avenue, a file for submitting construction permit applications for this project was opened at the Cleveland Building Department web portal (albeit identified with the wrong street — East 32nd Street).
Plans for Chester 82 were approved by the city in April, located on a 1.6-acre site that Marous has wanted to develop ever since it acquired most of the land in 2006 from the city’s land bank. On it, Marous will put an apartment building containing mostly one-bedroom units; roughly one-third of the 70 one-bedroom apartments will have dens. There will also be 29 studios and 22 two-bedroom suites.
“We have made changes over time to site planning and density,” said Arne Goldman, Marous’ director of business development. “We have gone from 162 to 131 units (and) parking from 165 spaces down to 138. (We) added a lot of landscaping. We’ve changed the massing of the building height.”
View of Chester 82 at the northwest corner of Chester Avenue and East 82nd Street. Construction permit applications are being submitted to start work on this project possibly before the end of summer (Sullivan Bruck).
Just north of Chester 82, another apartment building may go up soon. Geis Companies of Cleveland and Streetsboro is planning a 42-unit project at 1830 E. 82nd St. that’s similar in design and identical in unit count to The Lumos apartments, 1866 E. 93rd St., that opened earlier this year. Conrad Geis, director and managing partner at Geis Cos., said his firm was retained by ARPI Development LLC of Cleveland to be the developer on a programmatic basis for this project as it was with The Lumos. Financing is near to being finalized for this project.
Another building of similar size and unit count is planned by Geis at 1839 E. 90th St. but isn’t as far along in the assembly of its capital stack as East 82nd. The same development team is also creating Park Lamont which includes a four-story, 38-unit apartment building at the southwest corner of Lamont Avenue and East 97th Street. And, Park Lamont has 12 rental townhouses on the east side of East 97th, between Lamont and Woodward avenues, plus another 27 townhomes along the north side of the east half of Woodward, continuing all the way to East 101st Street. Park Lamont is named after the street next to the newly renovated Orr Park.
North of Lamont, East 101st turns into Ansel Road. That’s where more development activity is happening. Or, more accurately, the precursor to more development. In the vicinity of Kenmore Avenue, three old, neglected apartment buildings were demolished in the last several years, the most recent of which occurred earlier this year. At 1552 Ansel, The Linnette Apartments was taken down by its owner Vesta Corp. of Connecticut which also owns and recently renovated the adjacent Regency Square Apartments.
Although there is a Marous sign and construction vehicles parked on the site that was cleared of The Linnette Apartments, they’re not for construction on that site — yet. Those are there for repairs and renovations being made to the neighboring Wade Park High-Rise Apartments, 9500 Wade Park Ave., owned by the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, said Khalid Hawthorne, senior acquisition and development manager at the Famicos Foundation, a community development corporation for Hough, Glenville and St Clair-Superior.
Conceptual rendering of the proposed Lynette Gardens Senior Apartment Homes at 1552 Ansel Ave. This would replace the long-closed and dilapidated Linnette Apartments that were demolished earlier this year (Marous Brothers).
But there could be a development project on that site someday. Owner Vesta, developer Hopmeadow Development, Inc. of Connecticut, general contractor Marous and partner Famicos have jointly submitted requests for Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to help it finance the construction of a mixed-income, 65-unit complex called the Lynette Gardens Senior Apartment Homes at 1552 Ansel. Proposed are 52 affordable apartments and 13 market-rate units, according to its LIHTC application to OHFA.
“The development will reinvigorate the existing blighted property, and seamlessly fuse with a neighborhood that is undergoing a modern revival while maintaining its historic roots,” Hopmeadow Development’s LIHTC application noted.
Construction costs for the Lynette Gardens apartments are estimated at about $11 million but all costs taken together including acquisition, professional fees, site development and financing total nearly $16 million. The demolition of the prior structure alone cost $300,000 and was carried out by Environmental Renovation Group LLC of Lorain, according to city records.
Unfortunately, city records also show no visible progress on the start of proposed renovation work at the vacant, 10-story Ninety-Four Ten Apartments, 9410 Hough Ave. Once financing is in place, the former Kingsbury Apartments are to be renovated by Washington DC-based Northern Real Estate Urban Ventures (NREUV) and Sullivan Land Services Co. of Galveston, TX. NREUV said it hopes to get started first on redeveloping the Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza shopping center at 9300 Wade Park Ave.
Construction also has yet to begin for Gordon Crossing on East 101st at Woodward Avenue. Columbus-based Woda Cooper Development Inc. and Frontline Development Group of Beachwood plan an apartment building with 46 affordable housing units. Gordon Crossing won LIHTCs last year and could see construction by the end of this year. Lastly, Inspirion Group’s Addis View Apartments, 1878 E. 90th St., got its occupancy permit last week for 131 apartments in its first phase. However, no construction is imminent for later phases that could bring the total number of housing units to about 400.
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