An affordable housing developer in the Northeast Kingdom has begun work to construct 40 units of rental housing in Newport.
On Monday, RuralEdge started hazardous materials abatement work on Newport Crossing, a $21.8 million housing development that aims to offer affordable and mixed-income rental units to ease the ongoing housing crisis, according to Patrick Shattuck, the organization’s executive director.
“This will be a significant boost to meeting the need for net new units in Orleans County,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
RuralEdge recently acquired the long vacant Sacred Heart High School and Convent site in Newport City and two other properties on Rt. 105 in Newport Center.
Newport Crossing will include 26 affordable rental units at the convent site and 14 more in two new buildings in Newport Center, Shattuck said.
In a second phase of development expected to start in six months, RuralEdge plans to convert the former Catholic high school into 24 affordable condominium units called The Lofts at Sacred Heart. That’s separate from the Newport Crossing legal entity but a part of the redevelopment of the Sacred Heart site, Shattuck said. Further development could also take place on the remaining 8 acres there.
In the works for more than two years, Newport Crossing has been a “major priority” for Newport, said Rick Ufford-Chase, executive director of Newport Downtown Development, a local nonprofit that works to revitalize the city’s downtown.
“Most of the people I speak with clearly understand that housing is a major priority for Newport right now. So the fact that RuralEdge is about to build out at least 50 units of housing up on that hill, that is so close to our downtown area, is just a huge boon to the community,” he said.
The development is one the largest projects the organization has undertaken. It will involve demolishing two buildings in Newport Center and replacing them with new ones to match the village’s historic streetscape and provide some community space, according to a RuralEdge press release. The entire project will require significant environmental remediation work.
“It is promising to see a property that was not marketable and that was vacant for years being turned into what is now designed to be multi-family housing,” said Newport Mayor Linda Joy Sullivan in an email. “Any opportunity to mitigate (the) housing shortage in a positive way is a path forward.”
A draft update to Newport City’s master plan noted that, as elsewhere in the state, “demand for housing is exceeding the supply, home costs are rising, and in many instances, there is a mismatch between the types of housing that is available and what is needed.”
From reusing blighted buildings and cleaning up contaminated sites to adding new rental and ownership units, the project responds to the diverse needs of smaller communities, according to Shattuck. “And one way to achieve efficiencies of scale was to combine those two,” he said. “At the same time, it didn’t make sense to do all rental housing units in the former convent and the former school in Newport City. We wanted to create a new diverse, economically diverse neighborhood that had both home ownership and rental opportunities.”
Several parties have invested in or collaborated to help create Newport Crossing, including the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, Vermont Community Development Program and the Vermont State Treasurer’s Office.
“Investing in new housing will help lower costs, address workforce shortages, and strengthen Vermont’s economy,” said State Treasurer Mike Pieciak in the release.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Developer breaks ground on long-awaited affordable housing project in Newport .