By Kevin Boneske
Staff Writer

ASHWAUBENON – A company interested in developing 8.596 acres for multi-family residential use on two parcels owned by the village’s Community Development Authority (CDA) offered to buy the property for $473,000.

The CDA agreed Tuesday, Jan. 4, to sell the parcels at 1580 W. Main Ave. and 1571 Cypress Road for that price to Alliance Maintenance, LLC, subject to rezoning from BP (Business Park) to R-3 (Multi-Family Residence), as well as site plan and design review approval and approval of a formal development agreement between the CDA and Alliance.

Community Development Director Aaron Schuette said Alliance operates a number of apartment complexes in Brown County, most notably the Howard Commons project near the YMCA in Howard and Crystal Lake in Bellevue.

Schuette said Alliance’s offer to purchase the two parcels comes out to roughly $55,000 an acre.

“Those two parcels are part of the original Business Park plat going back many, many years before I was here (working for the Village of Ashwaubenon),” he said. “They’ve been vacant and farmed since that time.”

Schuette said multi-family residential development currently exists west of the property, with office buildings to the east, the American Family corporate campus to the south and mini-warehousing and miscellaneous land uses to the north in the Town of Lawrence.

“The offer to purchase is to purchase the property for use as a development of an apartment complex on both properties,” he said.

Schuette said the exterior materials will need to meet Ashwaubenon’s site plan review and design standards.

“Staff have reviewed the offer to purchase,” he said. “We believe it be a fair offer.”

Alliance’s developer, Erik Goerke, said the project will include a mix of three-bedroom apartments with two bathrooms, two-bedroom apartments with two bathrooms and one-bedroom apartments, plus den units.

“The rents range anywhere from around $1,100 to $1,800 (per month), so they’re also well above the typical apartment market,” he said. “The tenants that move into these units have higher credit scores and higher incomes than the median in Howard and Ashwaubenon, so they actually bring up the amount of disposable income in the neighborhoods that they go into.”

Goerke said the buildings are being designed with two stories and will have a third-story loft.

“It gives it a nice height, as opposed to the normal kind of two-story building, and on the inside it gives the space a lot of volume,” he said. “Those units have been extremely popular. Those are the units that go for $1,800, $1,850, maybe $1,900 (per month on a three-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms).”

Ideally, Goerke said the project would include about five buildings.

Schuette said rezoning the site will have to come before the Plan Commission and the Village Board.