The framing has begun for what will eventually be three low-rise affordable apartment buildings on the former Cameco meat-packing plant on the west side of Verona.
The Verona Town Council purchased the site in 2018 and worked with an affordable housing developer to create a plan for 95 apartments, ranging in size from one bedroom to three. Verona, which had owned the former Service League property nearby for more than a decade, subsequently agreed to purchase two adjacent properties owned by the Poekel family.
PIRHL, the Ohio-based developer originally involved with the project, has turned it over to Conifer Realty of Mount Laurel, N.J., which recently advised township management that the first building will be complete in August 2024, the second in November 2024 and the third in January 2025. Rental prices have yet to be made public, nor has the site to register to apply for them.
(Affordable housing means a residence that a household can afford by paying 30% of its income or less on rent or a mortgage. It is not Section 8 housing, which is geared to extremely low-income people supported by federal government vouchers.)
There is no construction yet on Verona’s other big housing complex, which will be on the Spectrum360 site at the corner of Sunset and Afterglow avenues. Only 15 of the complex’s 200-units would be classified as affordable, but the prospective developer agreed to pay $3.2 million to the Verona Affordable Trust Fund to help offset to the town’s purchase of the Cameco property. The Fair Share Housing Center, a nonprofit tapped by the state to set each municipality’s affordable housing goal, has approved both the Cameco/Poekel and Spectrum360 sites.
Verona has been working to understand what the impact of both developments will be on town infrastructure and the public schools. In late September, the Board of Education heard a presentation by Dr. Richard Grip, the executive director of the school demographics consulting firm Statistical Forecasting, who analyzed likely school enrollment from the 2023-24 school year through 2027-28. His report projected only 102 new students during the next five years from both existing housing and the planned developments.
