City Mission eyes next phase of Mission Place apartments
Eight-unit apartment building part of project
City Mission-Living Stones is pursuing the next phase of its Mission Place developments, which will add nearly a dozen units of permanent supportive housing at its campus along Gallatin Avenue in Uniontown.
Phase V of the project will consist of an eight-unit apartment building and an adjoining multipurpose building.
That mixed-use facility will have recreational space for youth on the bottom floor, coupled with additional administrative space for City Mission. The top floor would have more office space for City Mission, paired with three apartments.
The youth recreation space would also be multipurpose, allowing it to host staff trainings and larger functions like the Thanksgiving dinner for its residents, said City Mission Executive Director Irmi Gaut.
“We’re looking at it as the opportunity to expand from what we have here, which is just one small community room that we have for many functions,” she said.
Youth will also be able to use it for job and life-skills training, said Sherry Skidmore, a developer with City Mission.
The 11 units in Phase V join 42 already in use on the Gallatin Avenue complex — 12 built as part of Mission Place, and the 30 units of transitory and permanent supportive housing recently renovated at the Gallatin School Living Center, which also houses City Mission offices.
Even with those, there’s still a waiting list of about 90 people, Gaut said.
The permanent supportive housing helps assist working residents, low wage earners and homeless or formerly homeless people who would be most at risk of housing insecurity, Gaut said.
“The last time I looked, 40% of our clients are employed,” said Sherry Skidmore, a developer with City Mission. “They may be low wage earners, but they do contribute to the local economy.”
Combining that housing with on-site support helps keep residents stable.
That foundation has all kinds of multiplier effects on someone’s life, Gaut said: reduced calls to crisis hotlines, fewer visits to emergency rooms, less crimes.
City Mission also tries to build in supports, whether staff nearby who can assist with mental health problems, or services like transports for grocery shopping or the washers and dryers at the facilities.
“When you’re able to just build all of those supports into their housing, there’s less unanticipated or crisis situations that come up,” she said.
A tornado in 2018 damaged many of the buildings that stood nearby the Gallatin School. City Mission has gradually purchased many of the sites.
The first Mission Place project, Promise Place, provides housing for youth in City Mission’s program of the same name, which teaches life skills to youth aged 18 to 22 who are exiting the foster care system.
For Phase V, two parcels with “severely blighted” properties were donated, Gaut said. City Mission purchased another parcel and acquired another through a sheriff’s sale.
Building the eight-unit residential building will cost an estimated $3.4 million, to go with around $2.6 million for the mixed-use facility.
Those numbers are subject to change, Gaut and Skidmore cautioned. A grade on the building site might require a retaining wall. They also need to deal with stormwater management issues.
“If you’re building something, it’s never going to be cheaper than it is today,” Skidmore said.
Thursday, the Fayette County Board of Commissioners approved applying for funding from the state Department of Community and Economic Development’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program.
The project has already received $300,000 through the PHARE (Pennnsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement) Fund.
Gaut hopes to hear back on the funding requests by year’s end. If all goes well, they might be able to break ground in March or April, and have the buildings at least partially constructed by the end of 2027.
Phase V is the final piece of residential space envisioned on the Gallatin Avenue complex, but they’re still planning other improvements.
Gaut is looking to turn an area in the center of the campus into a green space for the approximately 120 Mission Place residents.
“A lot of our residents don’t have vehicles, so walking to parks or going to Ohiopyle, something that we all enjoy, is very difficult for them,” she said. “So we want to be able to do that.”
On property adjoining the Gallatin School parking lot, City Mission is also planning to build a maintenance hub that will help it coordinate what will be used at its 14 buildings across nine locations in Uniontown.
Gaut said she’s proud of the City Mission staff for a continuum of housing that can serve people’s needs, whatever they might be.
She wants to help eliminate the stigma that comes attached to affordable housing. “Curb appeal” is a priority, as well as resident safety, with landscaping and surveillance cameras among the features at the apartments.
“While they’re affordable housing, we do a lot with paint color to make the buildings have appeal, and we want to raise the standard of what people just expect to live in, so that then they can take pride in where they live, and it helps them then when they move on from here to have higher expectations for themselves as well, in terms of housing,” she said.
City Mission-Living Stones is not affiliated with the City Mission in Washington.