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Coming Soon!
New upscale houses in Fourth and Gill
by Matt Edens
This week’s column is a bit of a departure. Rather than try to sell you on the virtues of a 100-year-old house, the feature this week is a house—or, to be exact, three of them—that aren’t even built yet. Homebuilders and real estate developers do this all the time: buy a piece of land, subdivide it and then hawk house plans from a trailer/sales office.
Things typically don’t work that way in the center city. Inside the I-640 loop, about 99 percent of the houses sold are, well, old. New construction, by and large, isn’t really a factor in the real estate market, mostly since 99 percent of the new houses built in the center-city are the product of assorted affordable housing programs and therefore effectively outside the “market.” That may be one reason why the median value of owner-occupied homes in huge swaths of the center city is $50,000 or less. That’s right, the median (yet we are supposedly are in dire need of more affordable housing?).
This is, of course, where some blow-hard bubba who lives out on the Loudon County line chimes to the effect that “the houses are cheap because no one wants to live there” and segues into the usual dirge that downtown is dead, and we’d all be better off if the city just turned in its charter and called it quits. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, I suppose. But with downtown housing prices running around $150 a square foot (those are Sequoyah Hills prices, folks) I’m betting that rumors of the city’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Just a few blocks north, prices in Fourth and Gill are nudging their way towards $100 a square foot in some cases. Sweat equity is out; granite countertops and custom cabinetry are in. The real estate market’s resuscitated and the neighborhood’s rejuvenated to the point that quality of life is as much a selling point as “character.” (And before you get all uptight over gentrification, refer above to the second paragraph.)
How resuscitated? Well, last week the city issued a request for proposals for building three new houses on half of the vacant lot in Fourth and Gill where the McCallie School once stood—the balance of the site is to be developed as a park. And, to prove that the new administration is committed to building the city’s tax base from within, the houses envisioned aren’t exactly the sort Habitat builds. First off the minimum purchase price per lot is $10,000. Second, all the houses must meet the neighborhood’s H-1 historic overlay zoning guidelines. And that’s just the starting point: The winning proposal(s) will be selected by a competitive process, with 60 percent of the evaluation dependent upon design and materials. Bonus points will be based on things like the inclusion of second floor balconies, entries with transoms and sidelights, corbelled brick chimneys, leaded or stained glass, even slate or tile roofs. A reach? I don’t think so, and I know the market in the neighborhood pretty well. So if you want to build a new house in one of Knoxville’s neatest old neighborhoods, you’d better hurry. Judging from the number of architects, developers and Fourth and Gill neighbors already sniffing around this RFP, I expect I’ll have another column to write in a year or so—new houses, for sale.
September 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 39
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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