Neil Johnson njohnson@gazetteextra.com July 18, 2023
JANESVILLE
The 2-acre former Ossit Church Furniture factory site at 251 Hyatt Street in Janesville is now a barren grass lot choked with ragweed and tall, thorny bull thistle. A developer’s lawyer said that is going to change — effective this week.
After a few months of development incentive deal-making and plan commission and city council zoning and planned-use public hearings, the property, cleared since 2017 of the former four-story church pew factory is set to become home to a pair of eight-unit, townhome-style apartments. They will overlook the Rock River from atop the bluff east of Traxler Park.
The Janesville Plan Commission on Monday unanimously OK’d final development plans for the two planned apartment buildings that developer Kevin Hendricks is calling The Rock View Townhouses. The two-story, eight-unit townhome buildings will each have two-car garages and patios on the west side facing a wrought metal fence that separates the property from a nearby Union Pacific rail line.
Mark Robinson, a lawyer who represents Hendricks’ development company, Backyard Properties, told the plan commission Monday that Hendricks is eager to begin construction of the apartments.
“If it’s approved tonight, they’re breaking ground tomorrow,” Robinson said, noting that Hendricks had already considered the project a full go on May 1, after the plan commission OK’d a rezoning and a planned-use development proposal for the two apartment buildings.
The project comes at a time of critical shortage of housing. It would add housing stock to a former industrial property that until its demolition in 2017 had seen only marginal use for decades.
The new apartment plan passed muster with the plan commission and the city council earlier this year, despite some earlier sentiment by neighbors that the apartments would be too close to an active rail line with two to seven trains passing each day at low speeds.
Some residents also voiced concerns about extra traffic the 16 units would generate onto Harding Street from where a driveway to the apartments would connect onto Hyatt and Walker streets.
The area is an older, early 20th-century working class neighborhood tucked a few blocks south of the bustling East Memorial Drive.
The development already has garnered a city of Janesville tax incentive package of $750,000 for what Janesville Economic Director Jimsi Kuborn told the city council on May 22 is “much needed market-rate, multifamily housing units.”
The project also could tap $200,000 in state brownfield redevelopment funds to tackle environmental issues at the site, the city announced earlier this year.
Plans for the apartments show a three-bedroom upstairs layout with a ground-floor family room, dining room and kitchen space plus patios that would face a nearby rail line. Plans show it would be screened off from view by new trees and the wrought steel fence along the property’s west edge.
The plan commission OK’d final development plans after a brief discussion over red-ink markups city staff had made on the final documents.
Plan commission member Paul Williams and commission Chairwoman Kathy Voskuil both questioned whether the developer had officially agreed to the changes, which included alterations to the legal description and address of the properties as well as some minor changes to landscaping plans based on city requirements.
Robinson told the commission that Hendricks had agreed to all proposed city changes to the plans, which Robinson said he’d first seen on Friday.
Robinson said Hendricks’ hope is to launch the project now so that builders can get the two apartments framed up and closed in under a roof and outer walls by late fall this year.
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