We were taking a peek at the ZBA calendar for next month, and discovered a proposal for five triplexes on a large vacant lot at the northeast corner of 9th & Norris. In an effort to try to find out some more info about the project, we started doing some simple Google searching and we were amused to discover that we had already covered this project previously, almost five years ago. You can forgive us, we hope, for revisiting a project after such a long time and not remembering that we wrote about it before. As you might imagine, things are exactly the same as they were at this property when we first wrote about it.
But the surrounding area has experienced a major change over the last few years. Notably, a surface parking lot and storage area at the southwest corner of this intersection has been entirely redeveloped as Paseo Verde. A reminder, this building contains 120 apartments that specifically don't target Temple students, with about half of the units offered at below market rental rates. Paseo Verde has taken an area that was pretty bleak and made it much more promising, and makes the adjacent train station feel much safer. So it doesn't surprise us to hear about a student housing project nearby rising from the dead.
The student housing project was denied at the ZBA back in 2013 and you can see, the company that has owned the property since 2009 has been offering it up for sale. We couldn't tell you whether the new development is coming from the current owners or from someone else that has the property under agreement, but it stands to reason that we could finally see some construction here in the near future. The fact that the property was rezoned from single-family to multi-family should make it a much easier road at the ZBA, though the project was continued four times in 2016.
Even if the student housing project never gets off the ground on the north side of the street, PHA got approval last month to move around some lot lines on the south side of the 800 block of Norris and the 1900 block of N. 9th Street. From what we can tell, they'll build seven units over two buildings which we hope will compare favorably to Paseo Verde, architecturally. Realistically though, that doesn't seem terribly likely.