Planning Board OKs 12 affordable apartments on Blueberry Lane

LACONIA — Construction of 12 affordable apartments has been approved by the city’s Planning Board.

The 12 units will be built on open land at the Laconia Housing Authority’s Perley Pond Townhouses’ complex at 57 Blueberry Lane.

In unanimously approving the project Tuesday, the board stated the project will “provide affordable housing for the city in a market that has little affordable housing inventory.”

The authority provides subsidized housing for more than 700 households in the immediate Laconia area through rental apartments and housing vouchers.

Tom Cochran, the authority’s executive director, told the board that each apartment will have one bedroom and be about 600 square feet. They will be situated in two single-story buildings on land that abuts the Belknap County Nursing Home.

Perley Pond Townhouses currently has 35 apartments — both two- and three-bedroom units.

Cochran told the board that his agency will be applying for funds from the InvestNH program to help defray the cost of the project. Cochran said Laconia Housing needed to get the project approved by local authorities in order to apply for InvestNH funding.

InvestNH is a $100 million fund financed with COVID-19 relief money. Its purpose is to create more affordable housing in the state. The deadline for submitting applications is Sept. 2, with the successful applicants scheduled to be announced on Sept. 30. To qualify, projects need to be shovel-ready and be substantially completed within 18 months of the funds being approved by the Executive Council.

Cochran said he hoped to be able to provide an estimate on the project’s cost, as well as how much funding it would be seeking from InvestNH, in about two weeks once he had a more precise estimate of what construction and materials will cost.

This approval is the second the Planning Board has given in a month’s time to construction of apartments targeted to people with modest incomes.

In July, the board approved plans for a 14-unit apartment building on Water Street.