WHITEHALL — The Veneklasen Development group broke ground on the Harwood Flats project in Whitehall Tuesday, Oct 31. The empty lot behind Big John’s Pizza, across from Goodrich Park, will soon be home to 35 individuals and families in an apartment complex.
“The purpose of it is to bring residents living in downtown Whitehall and further activate the community,” said Veneklasen Development head Chris Veneklasen. “Bring people living and shopping, eating to the downtown area, and to provide housing in that area as well.”
Veneklasen and other City of Whitehall members agree the apartment complex will be a positive for the community, and will help with the lack of available housing in the area.
“There isn’t really anything of that nature that’s located right in downtown Whitehall,” Veneklasen said. “There’s sort of a built-in amenity automatically where you get to live near the community and walk across the street to Fetch to grab a beer. You can go shopping and you can walk to a restaurant. The park is right across the street and you have use of the water, which is a fantastic addition.”
After already doing projects similar to this in the past in a small-town setting, Veneklasen has seen the main benefits of building an apartment complex in town.
“We’ve done a few of these projects where we’ve done building in the downtown of smaller communities,” said Veneklasen. “One thing we found is that, in some cases, you have people that work in Whitehall. But because there’s a limited number of apartments, they end up living outside of the area. First and foremost, our hope is that you capture those people who are working in Whitehall, but are perhaps living in Muskegon that choose to commute everyday and now we offer them this opportunity to live in the downtown setting where they work. That’s what we see as one of the greatest community benefits that occurred.”
An additional benefit, Veneklasen explained, is the walkability to downtown is very favorable and will likely draw in more tenants.
“It also provides that amenity of being able to live in a town and have the walkability benefit,” Veneklasen said. “In a lot of cases, people live in smaller communities because they don’t want to deal with a larger city. But they like the smaller town feel. It’s not like Grand Rapids where you could live downtown, but have to deal with finding parking and things like that.”
Whitehall community members hope this new development will also draw in new businesses.
“I’m very excited to see it come to fruition,” said Whitehall mayor Steve Salter. “I think it’s a wonderful thing. Most people that I’ve talked to in the community think it’s also a good thing. I hope we’re going to get 35 new families coming to our community that want to live in the community that we all love. I also think this is going to be a catalyst for other wonderful things to come to Whitehall. I hope other people will say, ‘This is a great opportunity in Whitehall, we should bring our business there.’”
