The Burlington City Council on Monday approved the development agreement for the first phase of a major real estate project that will reshape the city’s South End.
The project, known as the South End Coordinated Redevelopment Plan, is a public-private development partnership between Champlain College and Ride Your Bike, the group of investors behind the nearby coworking campus Hula. The $100-million first phase includes two six-story buildings with 205 apartments on what is now a parking lot on Lakeside Avenue.
At Monday’s meeting, Community and Economic Development Office director Kara Alnasrawi and Ride Your Bike’s director of real estate development Todd Sarandos said Jonathan Rose Companies, a developer that specializes in dense, affordable and energy efficient housing, has been brought on for the project. Andrew Foley, the company’s director of development also attended the meeting. He said Jonathan Rose has been involved in similar projects across the country. This includes the Sandero Verde development in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
The first phase of the South End project will include 122 one-bedroom apartments, 49 studios and 33 two-bedrooms. Twenty percent of those units will qualify as affordable as mandated by the city’s inclusionary zoning regulations. The city hopes that, subject to the availability of other funding sources, even more of these units will be made affordable. There are also sweeteners in the agreement in the form of reduced fees for the developers if affordable units are made available at even lower prices than required.
The private developers will be in charge of designing the project’s public infrastructure while the Department of Public Works will have to approve and actually build it. The city is using a tax-increment financing structure to incentivize the development and plans to go after state funding set aside in the Community Housing and Infrastructure Program, or CHIP, created by the legislature last year.
In return for the private developers taking the helm, the city is reducing various construction fees and supporting the developers’ effort to secure half a million dollars from Burlington’s Housing Trust Fund and other grants.
Vermont Treasurer Mike Pieciak announced $8 million in the form of a low-interest state loan for the project in January.
The developers hope to have construction financing in place by the end of the year.
Though Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak has criticized her predecessors for their over-reliance on TIF districts to fund housing and infrastructure projects, which she has said contributed to the city’s desultory year-over-year increase in taxable property, she singled out this particular plan for praise.
She described the agreement as a “historic moment” that will bring “thoughtful, affordable housing development in the city in new and exciting ways that are value-based, that align with the city in terms of not only deeper affordability but creative thought around livability,” she said.
The council approved the development agreement with little discussion and offered bipartisan praise for Ride Your Bike and Jonathan Rose Companies.
“This is a huge change in the way we do things here in the South End,” councilor Buddy Singh (D-South District) said. “We’re going to get great infrastructure. We’re going to protect the lake. This is just amazing, and the fact that we’re using the newly minted CHIP to make this happen, these are all things that I hope we can model in other places.”
Also on Monday, the council agreed to amend, for the fourth time, the development agreement for the CityPlace project, now known as Burlington Square. The development, which is rising from an area once known as the Pit, will ultimately produce 153 units of housing, with 20 percent set aside for affordable housing under the city’s inclusionary zoning regulations.
Construction delays have led the council to amend the development agreement several times. The second time it was amended, a south tower “fallback plan” was created to ensure some affordable units would be made available there if the north tower was not completed by the end of June 2026. A lack of federal funding means the project’s builders will shoulder the cost, creating funding issues that made the extension necessary.
The fourth amendment extends the deadline for completing the affordable units in the north tower until the end of 2027 and eliminates the south tower fall back plan. The developers will be on the hook for a monthly fee to the Housing Trust Fund if the units aren’t ready by that time.
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