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Lexington City Council members held a work session last week with members of the development team from Echelon Resources Inc. and UrbanCore Construction to learn more about their proposed development for city owned property on Waddell Street.
Randy Cosby and Edwin Gaskin of Echelon and Andy Beach of UrbanCore opened the meeting with a brief presentation about their proposed plans for the site, including in updated preliminary design from what was initially submitted to the city in March.
The current preliminary site plan for the former Virginia Department of Transportation site is for two four-story buildings, holding a combined total of just under 200 one- and two- bedroom apartments. Echelon hopes to put between 150-200 units on the property.
Once built and the apartments rented out, the developers estimate that it would generate between $4 million and $5 million in revenue for the city in personal property and real estate taxes over a 10year period, depending on the number of units.
Most of the apartments will be market-rate apartments, with rents projected to be between $1,200 and $1,400 per month for a single bedroom apartment and between $1,600 and $1,900 for a two- bedroom apartment.
Echelon is proposing to set aside 20 percent of the units (between 30 and 40, depending on the final count for the number of units) for individuals making 80 percent of Lexington’s Area Median Income or less. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 2022, 80 percent of the AMI for Lexington for a two-person household was $43,800. Rent for those apartments, per HUD guidelines, would be set at onethird of the renter’s income.
Echelon is also planning to include a minimum of 3,000 square feet in one of the buildings fronting on Waddell Street for retail space. The current proposed design allots 5,000 square feet for that purpose, which could be used by one business or possibly multiple businesses. Cosby said that he’d met with Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of The Red Hen, Chamber of Commerce President Tracy Lyons and Main Street Lexington Executive Director Rebecca Logan to “kick around ideas for local businesses who could utilize the space.”
“The key from our perspective was, ‘How do we make this as prominent as possible, and give them as much of a presence and make them as accessible to community?’” he said. “The site is a little tucked back, but there is a fair amount of traffic with the school right there.”
Council member David Sigler asked if the developers saw the high volume of activity in the area from the school and other nearby city amenities such as the pools, skate park and Brewbaker Field, as a help or a potential hindrance to any business that might utilize the retail space. Gaskin said that he generally felt that it would not be a problem.
“Anytime there’s activity, we see that as a good thing,” he said. “Now, how we coordinate and cohabitate and live together, essentially, in the same neighborhood, that’s really a function of design and communication.
“We have to design to be good neighbors and then we have to operate to be good neighbors,” he continued. “Will there b e c onflicts? Yes, b ut I think the fact that there’s just a lot of activity lends itself to the overall vibrancy of what’s happening. It lends itself to customers for the businesses we’d be putting in and it lends itself to the customers of the businesses that are there. We see it as a good thing, but certainly something to be managed.”
Sigler also asked about the mechanics for the 80 percent AMI apartments noting that some of the first-year teachers and coaches in the area make more than that, but that marketrate apartments might be too expensive for them. Cosby said that the 200 units proposed on Waddell Street, as well as the 62 units Echelon recently received approval to install on Spotswood Drive, could potentially attract residents of Lexington who would be willing to pay a little more for the amenities, and thus open up some other affordable housing in the city.
“We’re approaching this as this project filling a certain band of the housing spectrum, and that band is the upper end of what’s available in Lexington as far as rentals go,” he said. “There’s kind of a ripple effect that’s a little hard to quantify, but intuitively that’s what we’re expecting to happen.”
Gaskin also weighed in, noting that affordability is “an increasingly complex problem to solve” due to a number of “macroeconomic forces that are stunning when you really think about it.”
“The cost of construction has really doubled in the past five or six years,” he said. “Interest rates have more than doubled in the past two. So whatever is built here, by whoever builds it, is going to be some of the most expensive structures built in Lexington, period. Not because of any construction mismanagement, but by virtue of the macroeconomic inputs that we have. If we’re taking all these ingredients and we’re trying to bake a proverbial cake, and we’ve got these ingredients, how do we address the issue of affordability?
“We don’t have the answers,” he continued “We do have the desire to do it, and based on some of the programs we might avail ourselves of, we might get some tools in the toolbox, but there’s a lot of wood to chop here, proverbially speaking, and we really need this leadership group and our team to really noodle this through as we go through this process. … Somehow, we need to make the numbers work on the most expensive real estate project that’s going to be built in Lexington and still make some element of it affordable. That’s a challenge, I’m not gonna lie.”
One of the most consistent concerns raised about Echelon’s development of the Spotswood property was the impact on traffic, with many citizens urging the city to require a traffic study of the area before moving forward. Sigler asked if Echelon would conduct a traffic study for this development, given that the Waddell Street proposal is both much larger and is being built next to a school.
Gaskin and Cosby both noted that VDOT has standards for when a traffic study would be required for a new development and if the development met those standards then they would do a study. Gaskin said that, in his experience, traffic studies that were done as a way “to try to calm people down” about a new development tended not to do so, since people who were opposed to the project could take any of the data points in the study and use them to justify why the project wouldn’t work.
“I think traffic studies, when properly used, can help us all build safer and better infrastructure, but they’re not a convincing argument, not efficiently persuasive or dissuasive,” he said. “They should attune us to an updated sense of the health of the infrastructure. We would be motivated that that infrastructure be healthy as well. We don’t want to overwhelm the intersections. We don’t want to create some sort of traffic nightmare that doesn’t lend itself to renting nice apartments.”
Mayor Frank Friedman requested that, if the city moved forward with Echelon’s proposal, any development align with “the look and style of the community.” Gaskin and Cosby agreed, requesting that they receive input and instruction on how to best accomplish that so as to avoid backlash similar to what the initial design for the Spotswood development received when it was revealed last December.
With their goal to include commercial space in the development, Echelon indicated that they would like to take advantage of the city’s new Planned Development-Mixed Use zoning ordinance and rezone the Waddell Street property under that ordinance. In response to a question from Council member Leslie Straughan, the developers indicated that they had begun some preliminary conversations with city planner Arne Glaeser about the process of rezoning to PD-MU and what requirements they would need to meet under the ordinance.
ECHELON Resources Inc. and UrbanCore Construction presented members of Lexington City Council with this preliminary site plan for the former VDOT property on Waddell Street. The plan proposes two buildings holding a total of 195 oneand two-bedroom apartments, several on-site amenities and a 5,000-square-foot retail space fronting on Waddell Street.
