SCHENECTADY — A four-story residential building of one-bedroom luxury apartments with retail stores on the ground floor will soon replace the now vacant sliver of land on one of the city’s more high-profile corners.
At the same time, on the next block over on the same side of State Street close to South Ferry Street, the same developers are set to knock down two existing, empty buildings to pave the way for the construction of 24 more of the same type of tony apartments along with a two-level parking deck of approximately 60 spaces, according to paperwork submitted to the Schenectady Planning Development Office.
Those builders, HighBridge Development and Prime Companies, who collaborated to bring the multi-million dollar Electric City Apartments with underground parking space and nearly 10,000 square-feet of street level storefronts to downtown Schenectady, recently won approval for the projects from the Planning Commission during separate meetings.
“They’ll be bookends to the Electric City apartments, so we have 24 of them going in on the east side and six more going in on the west side,” John Roth with HighBridge said Thursday, adding that the build out will bring the total number of units to about 234. “We’re doing it because we’ve been running at the high 90s (percent) in our occupancy rate for quite a long time and it’s just a natural progression.”
He also talked about the dearth of parking being a challenge.
“Everybody wants parking, and that parking has kind of hurt us down there, that’s why we’re building Phase 2 with the parking deck so that the apartments we’re building, their parking will be in the lower deck and then the upper deck, which will be that State Street level, that will be parking for all of our retail tenants,” Roth added.
Roth said that so far they have already secured one tenant,…
Read the full article here