Don’t you just love it when a parking lot gets turned into housing? We certainly do. One such metamorphosis is currently in its very early stages in Kensington at 3001 Martha St., a longtime municipal lot. This parcel is located along a railroad spur and was used as a coal yard in the middle of the 20th century, but it’s been a home for cars since the City took possession of the property in the mid-1960s. While a parking lot might have made sense at this location when the neighborhood was still known as the Workshop of the World, it sure doesn’t make sense today.

Fortunately, and perhaps somewhat miraculously, the Land Bank came to appreciate this reality. In 2022, PHDC issued a Request for Proposals, seeking a developer who would purchase the property and repurpose it for residential use. Specifically, the RFP called for workforce housing for sale, with a price limit of $250K per home. BMK Properties, a development group which has plenty of experience in this part of the city building both market rate and affordable units, won the right to buy the site and redevelop it. Now they have started work on a project that will eventually entail the construction of 20 two-story single family homes.

You can see, the developers have subdivided this parcel, which measured over an acre in size, as they prepare to start building new homes. While we are certainly pleased by the improved land use for this site, we are left to wonder whether homes were really the best use of this patch of publicly owned land. There’s a tremendous level of demand for affordable housing and only a limited number of development sites in the city; this site could have accommodated a couple hundred affordable rentals without breaking a sweat. Alternatively, to satisfy the requirement from the RFP that the units be sold, duplexes could have fit the bill and provided twice the density, with units priced even lower.

Despite the potential shortcomings of the project, it’s important to appreciate the glow up here, with car storage turning into people storage, er, housing. It’s not every day that we get to write about new housing that will be affordable to families making less than $100K a year, so we’ll still  count this as a win, even with our reservations.