Ithacating in Cornell Heights

This mostly reuses the Voice gallery writeup, but it’s a chance to publish all the unused photos as well.

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At the Village Solars site off of Warren Road in Lansing, phase five of apartment construction is underway. 24-unit 36 Village Circle North (3 three-bedrooms, 6 two-bedrooms, 3 one-bedrooms and 12 studios), which replaces an older 12,000 square-foot 10-unit structure, is fully framed, sheathed with ZIP Panels, shingled and fitted with doors and windows. The installation of exterior fiber cement trim boards has yet to happen, perhaps because the Lucente family’s in-house construction team was waiting for warmer weather.

Building M is a new build on previously vacant land. It is an 18-unit building with 12 studios and 6 two-bedroom units. It too is now fully framed, sheathed, and roofed. The sets of wires dangling from below the eaves are utility lines for the air-source electric heat pumps, as construction continues they’ll be bundled together and boxed up into the exterior siding (the heat pumps themselves will be boxed in with a decorative screen in a bump-out). The 50 year-old blue apartment building in the photos below will be torn down later this spring to make way for a larger apartment building.

As previously reported in late February, Rocco Lucente Jr. gave the following timeline for buildout: “We are on time, on budget, the project is going very well. We should have our current two (#36 & #119) completed by June and July. The next two (community center and #117) will come the next summer, and the final two (#2 & 22) will be the summer after that! So by Summer 2022 the current project will be completed.”