Great Barrington — During its regular meeting on Monday, August 22, the Select Board reviewed two proposals to redevelop the former Housatonic School, located at 207 Pleasant St. in Housatonic. The elementary school building, built in 1907, has been vacant since it was shut down in 2003. In January, the town put out a request for proposals to redevelop the building.
The two bids determined by the town to meet the minimum bid criteria outlined in the requests for proposals are bids from WDM Properties LLC and Arete Venture Partners LLC. Representatives from both companies were at the August 22 meeting to discuss their respective proposals with the board.
Town Administrator Mark Pruhenski explained that the presentations were part of Phase One of the determination process and that Phase Two involves collecting further data from the companies concerning their proposals, along with board and public comments.
Representatives from Arete Venture Partners LLC of Nanuet, N.Y. were the first ones to present their proposed project, including company general partner Jeff Glickman. If approved, Glickman and Elliot Firewalker will act as general partners for the project.
“Both Eliot and myself are extremely passionate when it comes to repositioning or repurposing properties, particularly properties with character, heritage, or historical nature to them,” Glickman told the board. “We are excited by taking spaces that have character, history, and that have a presence to them, then putting that sort of new spin into them and revitalized their use—invigorating them with energy and seeing them sort of flourish again. Elliott has a significant history of doing it in the United States, and I have a history of doing it in Canada.”
The company plans to turn the property into a mixed-use building consisting of 14 residential apartments. “We really felt a strong calling to it and the project. As we see, our vision for the project is very much in our wheelhouse. It’s exactly the type of thing that we like to do.” Glickman said, “There’s something magical that happens when there’s a mixed-use component when people are living in a place, and there’s a commercial, business, or institutional use on site.
“We want to highlight the heritage and the existing beauty of the building, that’s already there,” Glickman continued. “However, it needs a lot of work.”
Glickman said that the top two floors of the building would be turned into 14 residential units, with seven units per floor that they would be “high quality.”
“We will have a mix of two-bedroom units, one-bedroom units, and studio units,” he explained. “The ground floor is going to be turned into a commercial space. We want to find the right fit to be in that commercial space. We are planning on working with the community or Great Barrington and Housatonic to try and find the right tenant for that space. But ultimately, we want to have someone that we would all be proud to have on the ground floor of the building.”
Later on in the meeting, David Carter, company principal of WDM Properties of North Adams, presented his company’s proposal. WDM Properties is proposing to turn the building into 10 two-bedroom, market-rate residential units, with four identical units on the first and second floors, and “two slightly different floor plans for two units on the east side and the lower level.”
“I think you’re lucky that both of the applicants tonight have a deep passion for renovating older buildings,” Carter told the board. “Ninety percent of the work we’ve been doing in Berkshire County has involved buying and investing in old buildings, including adaptive reuse projects. We have been doing a number of adaptive reuse projects up and down the county, primarily for housing, in the last 10 to 15 years. We think that’s where the real need is in our economy for real estate development.”
Carter said that WDM Properties has worked on projects in Williamstown and Pittsfield similar to the one his company is proposing for the former Housatonic School. “We just completed the conversion of several churches in the last four or five years into housing, which is very similar to our proposed work to this school building,” Carter said. “Our proposal is a little bit different from [Arete Venture Partners’] because ours is very straightforward. We’re proposing to create 10 units, including four units on the second floor, four units on the third floor, and two units on the lower level.”
Carter said that the remaining space on the lower level will be devoted to storage space for tenants, and a mechanical room. “We don’t like to overdevelop properties that we redevelop, especially historic properties,” Carter said. We want to not obliterate and erase the inside features that we think are important to a lot of these buildings.”
Select Board Chairman Stephen Bannon asked Carter what the timeline would be for the project if approved.
“A lot of it will have to do with permits, which we think will be achievable in four or five months,” Carter said. “Private equity has been set aside, and we have good relationships with many banks throughout Berkshire County. Probably the most time-consuming would be putting together an application for historic tax credits. We think that’s achievable, but we know that right in the last couple of years it’s taken almost a year for developers to acquire the tax credits.”
