In the past couple of years, the Graduate Hospital neighborhood has seen a new wave of high-end development projects consisting of several town homes being built all at once, with prices exceeding $600K per house. Some, but not all of these developers, have used land formerly occupied by churches to accommodate these projects. It’s a delicate tradeoff for neighbors, who surely appreciate the higher comparable home values, but also surely regret the loss of architectural diversity and the connection to the neighborhood’s history. Taking the good with the bad, we offer updates on two such projects today.
Mount Olive AME
In September
Current view
Looking east
On the corner of 19th & Fitzwater, the former home of the Mount Olive AME church is seeing the construction of five new single family homes. We originally brought you the details about this project over the summer. As you can see, construction is moving quickly along, with minimal exterior work remaining but surely a couple of months of interior work still to be done. The homes are listed in the million dollar range, and we suspect that most if not all will be sold before construction wraps up.
Meanwhile, a mere block away, where the Varick church once stood…
Back in March
Just the other day
Looking east
Back in March, we told you that phase two of a ten-home project at 19th & Catharine had just gotten underway. Checking back in last week, it looks like the second batch of homes is nearing completion these many months later. All five of the first homes have already sold, and two of the final five homes have sold as well. Three more homes remain on the market, listed at $709K for to interior homes to $730K for the corner property.
Soon, both of these projects will be completed, eliminating frequent traffic inconveniences and welcoming over a dozen new neighbors to the community. With the other churches in the neighborhood looking like they’ll remain in the near term as far as we know, we don’t see too many more projects like this on the horizon. But who knows, with the success of these projects, developers may become more aggressive, and willing to pay more money for the few remaining large parcels in the neighborhood. So while it doesn’t seem likely that more of these types of projects are on the horizon, we can’t say it would surprise us to hear of another in the near future.