LEBANON — Nearly 2,000 housing units are in various stages of completion in Lebanon, with more than half of them studio and one-bedroom apartments. Some are closer to completion than others.
After putting off a decision to up-zone the area along Route 120 near the Hanover town line last month, the City Council requested an update on every multi-unit housing project under construction, approved by the Planning Board or seeking Planning Board approval.
At a meeting Wednesday night, Lebanon Planning Department staff presented an overview of 1,944 housing units across 15 projects in varying stages of completion.
Some are in the earliest phases of discussion and have yet to undergo formal review by the Planning Board, such as the Signal Park development off Route 120, while others are moving steadily toward completion, such as the Dartmouth-financed Sugarwood Circle in West Lebanon.
The conversation was a “kickoff” to an ongoing discussion the City Council expects to have about the state of housing in Lebanon, Mayor Doug Whittlesey said at the meeting.
After many residents and employers attended a council meeting in February urging against the construction of more studio and one-bedroom apartments, the council delayed the Route 120 rezoning decision and began a conversation about how the council can incentivize other kinds of housing.
At Wednesday’s meeting, City Councilor Tim McNamara said he was concerned by the number of studio and one-bedroom apartments in the pipeline.
“I hope it’s not one of those cases but it may be one of those cases where the market has overshot the demand and I think we need to be really careful about that,” McNamara added.
As the council representative on Lebanon’s Housing Task Force, which is working to update the housing portion of the city’s Master Plan, McNamara said he also is wary of the limits to Lebanon’s growth.
“I think our consensus is that we are near that point or at that point where we have to make some really serious decisions about where we’re going to go in the future, what we want to see,” McNamara said. “At some point, the land gets used up.”
Going forward, Whittlesey said he wanted to see how many single-family homes have been completed in the last decade and planned to bring Lebanon School District leadership into the conversation to discuss the district’s capacity.
Construction moving steadily along
Several large developments are under construction in Lebanon and moving along at a steady clip, Planning and Development Director Nate Reichert said Wednesday.
Planning Department staff have been completing several inspections a week at Marek North, an apartment complex on Mount Support Road near Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and at Prospect Hill, a townhouse and single-family detached development on Prospect Street near Lebanon Middle School, as units are finished.
Hingham, Mass.-based Saxon Partners are building 204 units, including 99 one-bedroom and 105 two-bedroom apartments at the Marek development.
Marek North is the second of three phases of the Marek project. The developer is currently seeking Planning Board approval of an additional 260 units dubbed Marek West to be built adjacent to Marek North. The developer is also having conceptual discussions with the Planning Department about building 10 townhouses on Mount Support Road.
Prospect Hill is the continuation of a development that first began in 2005 before getting waylaid by the Great Recession. Manchester-based developer Brady Sullivan Properties took over the project in 2009 before facing its own challenges and delays. After the city declined to approve an extension for the project, it took state intervention in 2021 to get the project moving again.
Now, construction has been ongoing on the 117 units of two- to four-bedroom townhouses and single-family detached homes.
At Prospect Hill, the “goal is to keep those framing crews framing, to keep all of those plumbers and construction crews there just going from house to house to house,” Reichert said.
Larger homes underway
Another single-family development, Westboro Woods off Seminary Hill, is a continuation of a project that was “half built and shuttered” in 2014. Reichert said there has been some “very very preliminary” developer interest in building the remaining 16 approved homes.
The Planning Board is actively considering a condominium development, Heritage Way. Developers Oaks and Son Construction are looking to build 13 standalone-units off LaPlante Road, also near Lebanon Middle School.
Brickyard One Nominee Trust, developers behind the 474-unit Brickyard apartment complex near Lebanon High School, spent the summer and fall fulfilling conditions of approval set by the Planning Board, securing state wetland permits and completing site work like clearing the property and building up erosion controls.
The Planning Board set more than 50 conditions of approval for the project, which Tim Corwin, deputy director of planning and development, said are taking time to work through. The Planning Department has a pre-construction meeting set with the developer this week and Corwin expects site work to resume as soon as April.
If all goes well, developers could begin work on the first buildings this year, but it may be more likely that construction does not kick off until next spring, Reichert said.
Financing in the works
Only one of the projects discussed by the City Council, 80 units called Muse Lebanon planned on Spencer Street, are being built as affordable housing. The project will be developed on city-owned land and include units restricted to households earning an average income of 60% of the Grafton County Area Median Income, or about $66,000 for a family of four.
“In terms of what Lebanon needs the most, this project is probably one of the tops of the list,” Reichert said. “Affordable housing in Lebanon is one of the rarest commodities that we have.”
Hollis, N.H.-based developer The Muse Lebanon, LLC has not started construction and is working on securing funding for the approved project. The Planning Department is hoping to “hear some good news” as grant decisions in the next few weeks, Reichert said.
The project is a redevelopment of a long-vacant city-owned property and will include four studios, 41 one-bedroom units, 27 two-bedroom units and eight three-bedroom units.
Construction has also yet to start on the Lebanon Woolen Mill project that is set to be built in the former Kleen Laundry facility off Mechanic Street. The City Council approved 11 years of property tax abatement for the 155-unit apartment complex in 2023.
Developer Jon Livadas is “actively banging away and trying to finance and pull together this project,” Reichert said. Livadas has also submitted a building permit application for phase one of the development that was pending as of March 10.
Question marks
Two projects that are “a little older and have less certainty” are the redevelopment of the former Village Market building in downtown Lebanon and the housing phase of River Park in West Lebanon, Reichert said.
Lebanon-based developer Ledgeworks has been working to redevelop the Village Market into a food court and build 148 studio apartments since 2022. The city has already extended deadlines twice for the project after developers struggled to secure tenants for the food court, which they said delayed the rest of the project.
There is “not a lot of active work that we have felt and at our level it does not mean the project has been abandoned, it just means we’re not seeing an outcome at this point,” Reichert said at the meeting.
Pellegrino’s Farmer’s Market and Italian Deli opened in the building next to the downtown fire station at 2 Mascoma St. in November. At the time, Ledgeworks had just missed a deadline to file for permits for the food court project and planned to ask for an extension for the rest of the building.
Another deadline to secure a building permit for the housing component of the project is approaching in July.
As of November, Ledgeworks Chief Operating Officer Tim Sidore said the expectation was still to meet the July deadline.
The developer is working through “a myriad of factors” in pre-construction like interest rates, finances, labor, materials, market conditions and regulatory requirements, and has installed water and sewer connections for the future apartments, Sidore said in a Friday email. Their primary focus so far has been getting the market open and “preparing” for the food court construction.
“Downtown redevelopment is a complex process, and nothing ever moves as quickly as we want,” Sidore said.
The city also highlighted eight units Ledgeworks is seeking to permit “posthumously” at 22 School Street, the former School Street School that closed nearly 20 years ago. Reichert said Ledgeworks built the units without permits and the city is seeking to bring the property into compliance with regulations.
Sidore said Ledgeworks secured approval to build four more apartments in what was then a four-unit building in 2017 and 2018, but the “process took so long that the project was no longer financially feasible.”
“Obtaining building permits in Lebanon has traditionally been a slow, challenging process (…),” Sidore said. “In 2023, Discovery Montessori unexpectedly departed, and we could not afford to wait out the process again. Hence, we constructed four premium apartments, using licensed professionals for all code-related work.”
The developer is now working with the city to “update paperwork and approvals as needed” and, if necessary “pay any additional, appropriate fees” for those four apartments and is securing approval for four more that have not yet been built.
Father and son developers David and Chet Clem first proposed the mixed-use River Park development including a life-science office and research space, retail, restaurants and housing in 2011. It has since suffered delay after delay amid disputes between the developers and the city. The New Hampshire Superior Court got involved in the project in 2024, and following that ruling, the Planning Board granted a one-year extension for the Clems.
The Planning Board continued the extension in August with a condition that the developers provide quarterly updates, Reichert said. As of February, developers anticipated selling the project to another developer, possibly in March, Reichert said.
The Clems did not respond to requests for comment Friday.