A groundbreaking for the Lake Area Townhouses located near SW 8th Street & Union Avenue in Madison will take place at 4:00 on July 27, 2016.
Local investors welcome the public to attend.
Custom Touch building new townhouses on-site
By Jane Utecht, courtesy of the Madison Daily Leader, published July 28, 2016.
"Black dirt is progress" with community development, said Rosie Jamison, executive director of the Greater Madison Area Chamber of Commerce.
Jamison's remarks came at Wednesday's groundbreaking for the new Lake Area Townhouses Phase IIA at S.W. 8th St. and Union Ave. in Madison.
The black dirt also provides a chance for diversification for the builder, Custom Touch Homes.
Jason McDonald, Custom Touch's general manager, said the Madison company will "stick build [the townhouses] on site."
The company could have built the 14unit structures in its factory, but McDonald cited a backlog as the reason for building the new townhouses on location.
They plan to use the same suppliers and subcontractors as with their factory building, McDonald said.
The company has handled a lot of onsite building with other projects, he added, and it is part of the
company's history as McDonald Construction.
The townhouse project will help "diversify our business," McDonald said.
"It will be known that we will go outside the box," for projects.
Custom Touch is also going outside the box on a small scale. McDonald was a source in an Argus Leader business story last week on tiny homes.
"We have done quite a few park models," McDonald said, and now they have a tiny home prototype with a loft featured at the company's visitor center on east SD34.
"We have a lot of people looking at that," he said, showing "a lot of interest."
Between the small homes and the big townhouses, "we will be as diversified as we can."
Along with that diversification advantage, the associated community development makes the townhouse project "a good deal for everybody," McDonald said.
Julie Gross, executive director of the Lake Area Improvement Corporation (LAIC), said, "We need people like [the developers] in town...to grow our town, grow our population and grow our community," she said.
"In order to do that, we need to have housing.
Bob Otterson, vice president for institutional advancement at Dakota State University, agreed.
"Housing is one of the central amenities for recruiting faculty and graduate students," he said, so private housing development "certainly has an impact on the university."
Mayor Roy Lindsay said the recent developments in Madison, such as the new hospital and new townhouses, make Madison more appealing and "gives people confidence in the town."
That confidence leads to more development.
"It doesn't matter which corner of the town you're in," Lindsay said, "there is improvement and investment being made, because people feel confident that Madison is going to be here for a long time."
One main focus for Custom Touch and the project developer, Phase 3 Development, is to keep Madison area businesses involved in the project.
Phase 3 Development partner Brian Kern noted that they have worked "to keep as many things local as we could."
For example, McDonald said, they are using local businesses such as Reinicke Construction for the dirt work and Loyal Electric for electric work.
McDonald said people "will see a lot of quick progress once the concrete work is done. The framing crew will be able to get the buildings up quickly.
``Hopefully the weather holds out," he added.
If it does, the east unit should be completed in December, Kern said, and the west unit in January.
These townhouses will be very similar to those across the street to the north, Lake Area Townhomes, built in 2013 by Lloyd Company.
"Other development will be coming as well," Kern said during his remarks before the ceremony. He explained in a later interview that development and infrastructure for an associated strip mall/office space will be done by mid-October and further development will occur as the need arises.
There has been some discussion recently about a potential fast-food development in that space. He said there is no definite plan; it was "just for illustration" to show how a business "could raise the tax base."
"It should be a fun and interesting project and a fun project to see develop," McDonald said.