New life for old Highlandtown Middle School in Baltimore

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Jun 22, 2009 by Robbie Whelan

The now-closed Highlandtown Middle School is set to become a $30 million, mixed-use apartment building offering loft-style units to a target market of students and professionals affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Hospital's East Baltimore campuses.

Focus Development LLC, a firm led by Shaffin Jetha and Rick Diehl, last week beat out two other proposals to win the approval of a seven-member panel comprised of staff from the city's housing and planning departments, to enter into an exclusive negotiating privilege with the city for the project.

The redevelopment project will be designed by George Holback, of local architecture firm Cho Benn Holback Inc., and will include about 120 apartment units, structured parking for 120-150 vehicles and possibly a cafe at ground level.

The hulking, 240,000-square-foot school building is catty- cornered to the eastern edge of Patterson Park, along Ellwood Avenue, an area that is often busy with joggers and dog walkers.

"If you really want to see what this neighborhood is like, come here in the morning and see how many people there are in the park," Jetha said, standing outside the building. "That's the real market: people who want to live in an apartment near the park, and there really aren't any [apartments]."

Focus will charge $1,200-1,300 for a one-bedroom unit, and $1,400 for a two-bedroom apartment, Jetha said, and the developer's proposal suggested buying the school from the city for $1 million, a price that the city has not agreed to.

If the sale price of the school rises significantly, Shaffin said, "we walk away, and hopefully [the city] has paid for lunch."

City housing officials said Friday that the school building still carries $750,000 in outstanding state bond debt that will probably be transferred to the developer.

Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano said the $1 million proposed price tab for the school is "really just a starting point," and that an agreement for the sale of the building will be submitted to city officials for approval in the next six months.

Financing for the project, which may cost as much as $30 million, will come from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development loans and up to $3 million in state historic tax credits. In addition, about 20 percent of the project will be funded by federal historic tax credits, and between 5 and 15 percent will come from outside private equity investments, Jetha said.

This part of Highlandtown is mostly made up of narrow two-story rowhouses and Latino corner stores. Over the past decade, home values in the Patterson Park neighborhood have quadrupled, but few apartment buildings have been built anywhere closer than Canton, the waterfront neighborhood to the southeast.

Holback said the school's units, most of which will be adapted classrooms, will resemble New York-style loft spaces, with large windows, 12-foot ceilings, and open floor plans. His firm, he said, has redeveloped eight schools in Baltimore as residential properties, most of them about a century old.

"Old schools make nice housing, basically because they have big windows and lots of daylight," he said. "The one issue with this building is, it's very large for its context -- you can see the scale of the rest of the neighborhood."

In order to make it fit in, Holback said, his design will "lighten" the

colors, materials and overall presence of the school building while at the same time preserving its brick facades and window layouts in order to qualify for historic tax credits.

Shaffin, who has spent the last 20 years with his father's company, buying bankrupt hotels, rehabbing them and selling them to new operators, is relatively new to redevelopment projects.

"Adaptive reuse is really a lot of fun," he said. "By the time we're done with [the school], it'll anchor the neighborhood."

The two other proposals came from Boston's WinnDevelopment and from Synergy Development, a team headed by Baltimore native and talk show host Montel Williams, whose proposal included an arts center with a theater in the school's 1,200-seat auditorium.

Chris Ryer, president and CEO of the Southeast Community Development Corp., a neighborhood business group, said the Winn proposal never got off the ground because residents objected to its lack of adequate parking and its idea for subsidized housing, and that Focus won the bid because of its commitment to addressing community concerns about parking and use.

"If we're going to have a tortoise and hare situation, Synergy was the hare, and Focus was the tortoise," Ryer said. "[Synergy] were fast out of the block and looked really good, but they never got the meat on the bones of the proposal. ... People were wondering if it was real or if it was just a come-on."