Details: At Home Apartments concept plan
Type: Market-rate rentals
Units: 114
Lot size: 3.27 acres
Developer: At Home Apartments
Architect: Collage Architects
Details: St. Paul-based At Home Apartments is floating plans for a new multifamily housing complex in Minnetonka on a site once slated for a senior housing co-op project.
United Properties gained city approvals in 2007 to build a 61-unit Applewood Pointe on the wooded 3.27-acre site, just south of the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks as they pass over Rowland Road in the city's southeastern corner. But that project was never built. At Home is proposing rental apartments on essentially the same footprint.
The developer, which boasts more than 4,500 apartments under ownership or management in the Twin Cities, St. Cloud and Kansas City, told the Minnetonka City Council this month that it is hoping to create 114 market-rate apartment units in a four-story building at the site, which is adjacent to Nine Mile Creek and the extensive wetlands of the city's Lone Lake Park.
At Home principal Mark Cashill told the council that the majority of the units would be one-bedroom, hopefully mitigating concerns about the substantial jump from the 61 units of the previous senior housing proposal.
"We think density should be considered in the number of beds, rather than just units," he said. "Applewood Pointe had 114 beds, whereas we have 141, a difference of only 27 beds. The demographics of the apartment market have flipped — in the 1970s and '80s, most were two-bedrooms, but now one-bedrooms are most in demand."
Don Jacobson is a St. Paul-based freelance writer. He can be contacted at hotproperty.startribune@gmail.com.
