Milford will soon have 21 new apartments for rent.
Work will begin on transforming the old Crestview Care Center into $2.5 million apartment housing after the Milford City Council approved a conditional use permit at its Feb. 1 meeting.
Hoppe Development of Lincoln plans to renovate the building at 1100 First Street into apartments, which should be available to rent by May 2023.
The old nursing home has been sitting empty since November 2019 when its parent company, Azira Health, closed its doors and those of three other nursing facilities in Nebraska.
Jake Hoppe of Hoppe Development said the project will give new life to the space and help alleviate housing stress in Milford.
“A lot of the housing shortage is reflected both in housing that isn’t being built, but also in housing diversity. There’s single-family homes, or maybe a 30-plex apartment, but this will all be on a single floor,” Hoppe said. “It might be appropriate for a young professional, or it might be appropriate for a senior who wants to downsize and not take care of a larger house. Housing diversity is just having the right type of housing for people at different stages of their life.”
The mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bed two-bath apartments will be rented at market rate, ranging from $750 per month for a one-bedroom to $925 a month for a two-bedroom.
The units are not subsidized or low-income housing. They will, however, be considered “affordable” because of the financing for the project.
The project was awarded a loan from the Rural Workforce Housing Fund, a statewide program that allows Milford and Seward County to distribute loans to increase the supply and quality of housing in the community.
The project also received $256,000 in Tax Increment Financing.
“That combination will allow us to offer high quality apartments, just not at the price of brand new construction,” Hoppe said.
The developer’s costs will be 60-70% cheaper because they are starting with an existing structure.
The property is under a redevelopment contract for $100,000, but its current valuation sits at around $750,000, according to the county assessor.
Hoppe said it will need a new roof and asbestos abatement, though the exterior will stay largely intact.
“We will gut everything internally,” he said. “Anywhere there’s not a load-bearing wall, we have the flexibility to come in and see what an ideal living unit looks like.”
Each apartment will have its own entrance from the outside, with different front porch-like areas, as well as a courtyard in the back that some units will open into.
The Milford Planning and Zoning Commission held a hearing prior to the city council meeting at which several residents expressed concerns.
Issues of additional traffic near the elementary school and not having enough parking for that many residents were brought up.
“The conditional use permit stipulates that they have to put a buffer between the elementary school and the units,” City Clerk Jeanne Hoggins said.
Hoppe plans to use the trees growing between the two properties and add more landscaping to create the necessary buffer.
He said the area will not see much more traffic than it did when the nursing home was operational.
“We did not do a traffic study, but looking at other multifamily unit traffic studies, at the peak times, it doesn’t impact traffic too much,” Hoppe said. “There might be nine or 10 trips in the peak times, which is not a level people will really feel.”
Hoppe said this is his third project of this type, following others in Fremont and West Point that are currently under construction. Those communities also experienced nursing home shutdowns – something he noticed was an unfortunate trend in smaller towns.
“It really came out of seeing in the news that there were a lot of facilities like this being closed down. They were usually in really nice areas of town, not exposed to floodplains or other negative residential features,” Hoppe said. “We started looking into how to renovate these into nice units and address some of these housing shortages at the right price points to give these communities an option of what they can do when this happens.”
The Milford project is still in the design phase, but Hoppe expects to begin construction in May of this year and have the apartments leased by May 2023.
