Wright City aldermen have granted the first of several approvals needed for construction of new townhomes behind the city’s DG Market/Dollar General store.
Aldermen voted 4-0 on Feb. 23 to …
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Wright City aldermen have granted the first of several approvals needed for construction of new townhomes behind the city’s DG Market/Dollar General store.
Aldermen voted 4-0 on Feb. 23 to allow a little more than two acres of empty field behind the store to be designated as a zone for multi-family residential buildings. Developers will still have to present specific plans for final approval before they can begin construction.
The project is being proposed by Pops Properties LLC, based out of Troy.
Alderman Ramiz Hakim said the owners of the company also previously purchased the Northridge Apartment buildings just north of the project site, and have been making a number of positive improvements.
Pops Properties representative Adam McCarthy said the company plans to build 24 two-story townhomes with one-car garages. The facility would also have a sport court, playground and dog park, which were all additions that were recommended by the Wright City Planning and Zoning Board, McCarthy noted.
He said that the townhomes will all be three-bedroom family homes, and that the rent is currently estimated at over $1,500. But the facilities will take several years to build, and that estimate could change, McCarthy cautioned.
Pops Properties representative Monica Reed added that the company requires tenants to meet a certain income threshold, pass a background check, and have no bad renter history.
The property for the townhomes, which sits between the DG Market and the existing Northridge Apartments, was previously zoned for construction of age-restricted senior apartment facilities. In fact, aldermen actually changed city ordinance in 2020 to make that project more feasible by allowing smaller, more compact housing for senior facilities.
But those senior apartments were never built. The prior developer, Bayer Real Estate LLC, decided the project wasn’t economically feasible, and instead decided to transfer the property to a new developer, said McCarthy, the Pops Properties representative.
Only two community members commented on the rezoning during the Feb. 23 meeting. The first was a local resident who irritably demanded to know whether the townhomes would be government-subsidized housing, and stated, “We already have enough problems.”
Reed and McCarthy, the developers, answered that the homes would not be government-subsidized.
The second commenter was Joe Purl, the operator of Wright City Community Food Pantry and an advocate for low-income families. He asked if the new play areas for the townhomes would be open to the tenants of the Northridge Apartments, since Pops Properties now owns those buildings as well. Purl noted that right now, families from the apartments can use the open field as green space to play in, but they won’t be able to do that once the townhomes are built. McCarthy said the new recreational areas will be open to any of the company’s tenants from Northridge.
