The Bank of Holland has been chosen to finance Newberry Place, West Michigan’s first cohousing project. Located at the corner of Livingston and Newberry Streets, Newberry Place is a community of twenty townhouses where residents share certain common areas. The project has been in the planning stages for the past two years.
“The bank has been really great,” said Steve Faber, one of the project’s founders. “They came to one of our meetings, and afterward they pulled me aside and said, ‘You have an amazing group of people here. You should be very, very excited about who’s a part of this project.’”
Faber said there’s still a long way to go before the official groundbreaking, tentatively scheduled for the end of this month: construction bids must be reviewed, and an alley that runs through the property must be “vacated.” That requires a court hearing in order to get an OK from the city. The hearing is set for mid-October.
“I think probably what’s the most exciting for us is, the last two years we’ve been really focused on the sticks and bricks part of the project,” Faber said, “but the last few months, as we’ve hired individuals to come in and do their work, we’ve been able to focus on the people side of it, which is really the heart of cohousing.”
Four town homes are still available, ranging in price from $125,000 for a 900-square-foot, 2-bedroom unit to about $220,000 for a 3-to-5-bedroom unit.
“We’re a self-developed project so there’s a lot of learn as you go,” Faber said. “On the up side, that’s what makes it so customized.”
Source: Steve Faber, Newberry Place
http://www.newberryplace.org/