The property is south of the Kettering Business Park and was part of the Air Force’s 165-acre Defense Electronic Supply Center, which closed in 1996.
Kettering officials and developers have been discussing Acorn Walk since 2006. It was shelved in 2008 due to the collapse of the housing market.
The Columbus-based Franklin Foundation, which runs three other subsidized senior units in Kettering, will manage the senior apartments.
The more than $3 million first phase also will include construction of five duplexes and one single home. The park will be built in 2013.
Bill Hibner, director of construction services for the developer, Oberer Thompson Co., said work on the remaining 14 single homes and eight duplexes or attached single homes is also expected to begin in 2013.
“We’ve been working on this for some time. There are a lot of parts and pieces that had to come together,” Hibner said.
Kettering assistant city manager Al Fullenkamp said that single homes would be in the $140,000 to $150,000 range and that the developer will pay for most of the new streets running through the development. Only the senior apartments will be subsidized for limited-income residents.
City costs to clear the site, build the park, improve Acorn Drive and West Avenue, extend Wiles Avenue, install utilities and remove the fence along West Avenue will total more than $1.26 million, plus a $125,000 community development block grant.
The city will pay down its expenditures over 30 years with tax-increment financing from the development. The Kettering Board of Education, which will not receive that property tax revenue during those years, has passed a resolution approving the plan.
The Franklin Foundation has received a $2.6 million federal grant to build the senior apartments and parking lot. The complex will be similar to the foundation’s 24-unit Irene Gardens on East Dorothy Lane, Birchwood Place on Galewood Street and Kettering Park Manor on Woodman Drive. All three have a waiting list of income-eligible senior applicants.
The park will be named for Maj. Dominic Gentile (pronounced “Jen-Tilly”) (1920-51), a Miami Valley native and World War II fighter pilot ace. DESC also was known as Gentile Station.
Kettering’s two most recent residential developments — the 35-unit Villas at Kettering Pointe, behind the former Van Buren Shopping Center, and the two-phase, more than 90-lot Madison’s Grant, off Swigart Road in Greene County on 111 acres the city annexed from Sugarcreek Twp. in 2003 — are nearing completion, Fullenkamp said.
According to city planning and development director Tom Robillard, “There have been a smattering of in-fill houses built on single lots over the past few years, but that’s been about it.”
Fullenkamp said the surrounding neighborhood for Acorn Walk “is one of our oldest. The Wiles area was platted in 1917, Acorn in the late ’20s and early ’30s. Houses were built there through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.”
To visit the current city park, residents have to cross Dorothy Lane or Wilmington Pike.
The goal with Acorn Walk “is to interconnect, bolster and reinvigorate the neighborhoods on both sides,” Fullenkamp said.
No date has been set, but city officials plan to brief neighborhood residents on the details during a meeting in August.
“We have shown them plans so many times in the past that it began to seem like we were crying wolf when it never started because the economy soured in 2008 and ’09,” Fullenkamp said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2377 or terry.morris@coxinc.com.
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