Old Kmart site will only get about half of anticipated affordable housing units

FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) - The old Kmart site on University Drive in Fargo was supposed to house about 80 senior living apartments.

Now, only about half will actually get built.

Enclave and Beyond shelter Inc. are in partnership to develop the affordable housing units on the site.

Now the developers no longer have enough funding to complete the project that was anticipated.

“The world is changing fast and furious related to how we assemble our financing,” said Beyond Shelter’s CEO Dan Madler.

Eligibility for certain funding through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had changed due to environmental rules.

The money expected for the project became unavailable.

Madler says the site has had environmental issues including contaminated soils.

More environmental clean-up is still needed to be done to prepare the property for development, but the funding from hud cannot be used to fix the issue.

Due to this, the developers did not have enough financing to build all 80 units.

“Our Plan B is to do a 39-unit project.“ said Madler. ”In the future, if we can assemble another project for the remaining land, we would look at reuse for that site with limited commercial. It could be retail or offices.”

Madler says the organization is rapidly growing and there could be the possibility for Beyond Shelter to house its offices on the remaining land.

The project is expected to break ground this fall.

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