Morganton’s sparse housing market may soon get some relief after the city received more than $2 million in grant funding to support housing development from Dogwood Health Trust.
Part of the grant, $450,000 of it, will go to support housing development on Church Street.
City Manager Sally Sandy told The News Herald the grant will support water and sewer infrastructure at an old Drexel Heritage property near Church Street in Morganton.
The property has long sat empty, but recently it was purchased by The Industrial Commons whose goal is to develop it into affordable local housing.
“We’re very excited about it, and we’re very excited to be working with the city,” said Sara Chester, co-executive director of The Industrial Commons. “Being able to partner with them on the application was great.”
People are also reading…
Chester said initial site plans have 14 single-family lots and 23 townhomes going on the property, but those plans still are being worked out.
“It’s awesome, because again … we need all kinds of housing, whether it’s affordable, workforce, market rate, multi-family, single-family,” Sandy said.
Chester said the group is leaning more toward ownership opportunities for the homes, but that there could be a mix of rental properties on the plot.
“We’re really interested in making it affordable housing,” Chester said. “We’re still researching the best mechanisms for that.”
This property on Church Street sits across a set of railroad tracks from another 27-acre parcel the organization bought last year, Chester said. She said the properties had some issues — a fire on one of the lots and some materials that had been left on the other — that made them less attractive to commercial developers.
“We see our role as being a nonprofit, having the ability to bring additional resources to the table to take properties like that, that have additional challenges, and still get them back into a productive use,” Chester said. “In our mind, again, the highest and best use for that front piece, the 27 acres, is development that has a shared, central building and then is primarily used for manufacturing, and then for this parcel on Church Street, the highest and best use is affordable housing.”
Chester said her organization would like for this development to be done in a way that avoids gentrifying the neighborhood.
“It would be lovely to see more of that part of town be put into a good use, but I think also done in a way that doesn’t put the existing uses at risk,” Chester said. “We don’t want to make that neighborhood unaffordable … We’re trying to get out ahead of that.”
Plans for those properties still are in their early stages, but Sandy said more information should be released at a future city council meeting when the council will consider entering a memorandum of understanding with The Industrial Commons.
The rest of the grant, which came in at $1.695 million, will go to help the city replace and develop water and sewer infrastructure along N.C. 181 west of Morganton, Sandy said.
The city matched the $1.695 million with American Rescue Plan funds, and Sandy said city officials expect the total cost of the project to come in at around $3.4 million.
Once the project is said and done, 1,000 linear feet of new sewer line plus 1,000 linear feet of replacement sewer line will be installed to serve current and future customers. It will also fund a new pump station for the area.
Developers over the last several years have eyed that area for development of multi-family housing projects, but existing sewer infrastructure couldn’t support the developments.
“It’s a significant investment, and to have the opportunity to get to do it this way, it’s fantastic,” Sandy said. “And to, hopefully, open up for residential, some commercial development, for really working on the western end of town, is something that we’ve been looking at … for several years, so we are really excited to get to do it.”
The Morganton City Council awarded a contract for design of the project at its November meeting. Sandy said the city hopes the project will wrap up in fall 2023.
Chrissy Murphy is a staff writer and can be reached at cmurphy@morganton.com or at 828-432-8941. Follow @cmurphyMNH on Twitter.