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Norfolk — Nearly two years after Norfolk officially set the St. Paul’s redevelopment in motion — a massive plan to tear down half of the city’s public housing and reimagine a wide swath near downtown — the first wave of new construction will begin.
Slowly over the next two years, four new apartment buildings, major road work and a pump station will all emerge from the dirt around the Hampton Roads Transit station on St. Paul’s Boulevard.
The plan is for things to kick off in January, though the redevelopment seems like it will continue to proceed in fits and starts. The relocation of thousands of residents remains largely on hold while the coronavirus pandemic lingers, and a federal lawsuit filed by residents seeking to block the entire effort is still pending.
Susan Perry, who oversees what Norfolk calls the Office of St. Paul’s Transformation, laid out the construction plans to the City Council earlier this month.
The city is aiming to demolish the first public housing building in Tidewater Gardens — known as Building 61, at the corner of Wood and Fenchurch streets — within a few months.
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But it won’t exactly be the first domino.
Perry said the city only has clearance from federal housing officials to bring down that one building. The rest will be demolished in larger phases, but the city still hasn’t gotten the go-ahead. Hundreds of families still live in public housing in Tidewater Gardens, the first of three neighborhoods set to be completely torn down and rebuilt.
There’s still one family left in Building 61, who Perry said is in the process of moving out. The project is set to go out for bidding by potential contractors in November, and the city expects construction to start sometime after the first of the year, Perry said.
Taking down Building 61 will clear the way for a new water and sewer pump station, the first construction that will get underway in the St. Paul’s quadrant.
New housing, new connections
Across the street, the area’s first new residential development will start in tandem with major road work next summer.
Four lots around the Hampton Roads Transit center, which opened in 2016, will each become apartment complexes. The designs for these buildings have been slowly working their way through the city’s planning process. All four will likely be given the full go-ahead by the end of the year.
The first two, set to start construction sometime in mid-2021, will be located along Wood Street, between Fire Station 1 and Fenchurch Street and north of the transit station.
The plan from Norfolk’s chosen developer, Chicago-based Brinshore, includes 190 apartments between two buildings. One of those will be reserved for seniors. The developer has said it expects the buildings to open around mid-2022.
A similar pair of apartment buildings is planned for two lots to the south of the transit station.
These apartments will front a planned extension of Freemason Street — part of the city’s effort to reconnect a section of the city that was deliberately cut off by racist housing policies and design decisions when the public housing in the St. Paul’s area was built in the 1950s.
The street work will also include a realignment of Church Street and likely won’t start until late next summer, around the same time the first set of apartment buildings will begin construction, Perry said. A second wave of street work dealing with the interior streets and roads of the redeveloped neighborhoods is planned to start in 2022.
To make way for the new Freemason Street, the Shell Station that stood along St. Paul’s Boulevard for years has already been removed and the McDonald’s next door will operate until the end of the year before being demolished in January.
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However, Perry said the McDonald’s will relocate to the first floor of the newly-constructed apartments along Freemason — with the drive-thru intact.
“With the pandemic, everybody tells us how important the drive-through is,” Perry said in an interview last week. She said the plan includes effectively a back-lot drive-thru as part of the apartment design. “We’re really excited about it. It feels like an urban feel of a McDonalds.”
That set of apartment buildings won’t begin construction until 2022.
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And while technically not part of the redevelopment, a new apartment complex geared toward residents with disabilities will also begin construction this week just across Tidewater Drive.
Virginia Beach-based developer Lawson is starting work on a 164-unit apartment complex called Market Heights at 630 Tidewater Dr. About two-thirds of the apartments in the project will be specially designed or reserved for people with physical or developmental disabilities.
Lawson said it expects to complete construction and start moving people in early in 2022.
Market Heights and the four apartment buildings now planned near St. Paul’s Boulevard are all being built under the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program — effectively a program that offers developers tax breaks if they are willing to develop housing that guarantees a certain percentage of residents will make considerably less than the area’s average household income.
Dan Hankin from Lawson said the developer is heavily focused on affordable housing using the tax program and is wrapping up work on a similar project down the street, on Norfolk’s Campostella waterfront. That project, called the Retreat at Harbor Pointe, also uses the tax credits and was built with disabled residents in mind.
“With the loss of public housing (in St. Paul’s), there’s obviously a huge demand for affordable housing,” Hankin said.
Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com