CNE President and CEO Martina Guilfoil speaks at Tuesday’s groundbreaking for the Mai Bell apartment complex.Highland Park is about to get its largest investment in 50 years.
Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE), a nonprofit organization formed to promote housing and neighborhood redevelopment, broke ground Tuesday morning on the “Mai Bell,” a $4.7 million, 49-unit apartment complex in Highland Park that’s named after the late Mai Bell Hurley, who was one of CNE’s founders, a patron of the arts and the first woman elected to the Chattanooga City Council.
“We just thought there was no better way to honor her legacy,” CNE President Martina Guilfoil said of Hurley, who was an advocate for affordable housing.
The three-story apartment complex at the corner of Bailey Avenue and South Hawthorne Street should be finished by the spring of 2017. It will have a commercial space on the ground floor and 11 affordable units, CNE says, with rents that will start at $481 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, $652 for a two-bedroom and $868 for a three-bedroom.
Affordable housing is important to build in Highland Park, said Guilfoil, since new houses being built there cost $200,000 and above. That’s a change, she said, from when CNE bought land in the neighborhood from Tennessee Temple University.