Garden City adapts to demographics

NEW LIFE: The interior of a unit in the planned 125 Midway building in Cranston. The building is part of a project transforming the former Cranston-Johnston Regional Catholic School in the Garden City section of Cranston. / COURTESY TIM NELSON 3D
NEW LIFE: The interior of a unit in the planned 125 Midway building in Cranston. The building is part of a project transforming the former Cranston-Johnston Regional Catholic School in the Garden City section of Cranston. / COURTESY TIM NELSON 3D

Garden City in Cranston may be a sign of the future once again.
When the shopping center and adjacent neighborhood were built on a former coal mine in 1948, they were an archetypal post-war suburban development, turning inexpensive land and the growing highway system into an expanse of single-family homes and malls.
Over the next several decades, developments such as Garden City would lead residents and businesses out of old city neighborhoods into larger spaces further and further from one another.
Now that the suburbs themselves are aging and changing, Garden City is adapting.
The new urbanist principles of compact design, mixed use and walkability have filtered into suburbia in recent years, making it look slightly more like those city neighborhoods it was designed to replace.
Across the street from Garden City Center, the Chapel View development from Carpionato Group mixed offices and the adaptive reuse in with traditional suburban retail.
And now D+P Real Estate and Truth Box Inc. are building rental housing with even more urban elements in a former Catholic school between Garden City Center and its single-family subdivisions.
When two phases of the development are complete, it will include 53 new apartments ranging from 600 to 1,300 square feet within a few yards of Garden City’s shops.
The first phase, which broke ground this fall, is named 45 Pop Lofts and involves the conversion of the former Cranston-Johnston Regional Catholic School into 20 “loft-style” one- and two-bedroom apartments with rents ranging from $1,300 to $2,200 per month.
“The school was vacant and abandoned with a better future calling and we specialize in infill and abandoned properties,” said Jordan Durham, principal of D+P Real Estate about what attracted him to the project. “And this being right next to Garden City made it attractive.” D+P and Truth Box purchased the former school, which closed in 2009, and 2 acres of land from the Providence Archdiocese for slightly more than $1 million. (The church kept a 24,000-square-foot gymnasium that had been part of the school.)
The plan calls for gutting the 1961 school and reinsulating it to make it as energy efficient as possible.
On vacant land next to the school, D+P and Truth Box plan to build a new three-story, 40,000-square-foot building with 32 apartments, a gym and underground parking called 125 Midway. That building should qualify for the top Energy Star efficiency grade and consume about half the electricity of an average new structure built to current codes.
Durham and Truth Box principal and architect Peter Gill Case come to Garden City with plenty of urban credentials.
Their offices are in the Box Office on Harris Avenue near Providence’s Eagle Square, which Case designed out of shipping containers. Their other projects include the Ritz Camera Building in downtown Providence and the renovation of nine affordable housing units in the Mount Pleasant section of the city.
If all goes according to plan, 45 Pop Lofts should be ready for February or March and 125 Midway by the end of 2015, Durham said.
The combined projects currently have 250 people on the waiting list to lease units.
The density of the new Garden City projects and their walking access to the mall give them an urban flavor, but even when they are complete the area will remain unmistakably suburban.
Garden City is served by busses, but there’s no rail access and the area does not approach the scale or density of classic transit-oriented development projects, the leading incursion of urbanism into the suburbs. Midway and Pop Lofts will come with resident parking and Durham said he does not expect tenants to go car-free.
Still, in an era when e-commerce is shrinking demand for traditional brick-and-mortar, suburban retail space, the projects suggest an opportunity for older malls and shopping areas in New England and elsewhere.
Ordering something online may be more convenient than negotiating traffic and parking to get to a mall, but not necessarily walking a few yards to that mall.
Of course placing apartments or condominiums near shopping is not in itself new, even to the suburbs.
Just a few miles away, the Villa Del Rio apartments are within walking distance of the Warwick Mall.
Perhaps as much as a desire for walkability, projects like those at Garden City are benefiting from a rising general demand for multifamily housing driven by demographic shifts away from large numbers of families with children.
So-called “empty-nesters” whose children have left home and young people starting out are tipping the market toward rentals and Durham said those markets are certainly targeted at Garden City.
Bruce Lane, broker owner of Williams & Stuart Real Estate in Cranston, said he sees the appeal of the new Garden City buildings as well as the single-family neighborhood next door.
“Garden City is a perfect example of being within walking distance to shopping being a big draw,” Lane said. “I would think Garden City would be speaking more to the empty-nest market, because it is not proximate to downtown, which is where younger renters might want to be.”
As further evidence, Lane said he and his wife, whose children have moved away, are on the waiting list for the new buildings. •

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