We were scanning the zoning calendar as we often do, and an address caught our eye for reasons we couldn’t quite determine in the moment. Why did 501 W. Norris St. give us pause? It didn’t take more than a few seconds of research to connect the dots, as we quickly realized that the address sounded quite familiar to us because OCF Realty, our parent company, listed that property for sale just last year. Developers purchased the vacant lot in December, paying $185K for the nearly 5,000 sqft parcel.

Considering the size of the property and the fact that it’s zoned multi-family, that’s a very low price, at least in the abstract. You may wonder, how were these developers able to snag this property for what seems like a rock bottom price? But if you consider the most important thing about real estate (rhymes with vocation), it starts to make sense. Put simply, there hasn’t been much happening, development wise, at 5th & Norris. A few blocks to the west, you start running into student housing development overflowing from the neighborhoods around Temple. A few blocks to the east or south, there’s all kinds of development on the edge of South Kensington. Those are some long blocks though, so this seemed like a buy and hold property for an investor hoping that the development would spread here eventually.

But as we mentioned, the property was on the zoning calendar, which means that there’s a project brewing here in the very near future. The ZBA granted the variance last week, and we can tell you that the proposal will mean four (or maybe five, the application is confusing) duplexes on this corner. Will this project target students? Will the units be affordable? We don’t know for sure, but we’d think that market rate rental units would struggle here.

Then again, maybe this area isn’t as much of a development dead zone as we thought. It turns out, as we were looking into the project at the corner, it also came to our attention that there’s another project in the pipeline for the 16K sqft parcel to the north. Developers proposed a 39-unit project here which was continued at the ZBA a couple weeks ago. Assuming that project gets approved and built, this corner will suddenly have considerable activity after many years of vacancy. In the context of the larger project next door, the duplex project makes a lot more sense. With this much density, market rate could be possible, though affordable housing would still seem to make the most sense for now.