LEBANON — Dartmouth College is partnering with an Upper Valley developer to build 21 houses in West Lebanon for faculty and staff.
The college has agreed to finance a $15.2 million development to “help meet a pressing need for more housing in the Upper Valley,” according to a college news release. The project features 14 two-story houses, three duplexes and a single-story home “designed for accessibility.” In September, the first houses will be available for Dartmouth employees to rent at “market rates.”
Construction is expected to finish in fall 2026.
The complex is being built on a 5-acre property on Oak Ridge Road in West Lebanon. It is across Route 10 from another Dartmouth College-owned housing complex, Sachem Village.
“It’s a project I’ve always been really excited about because I think there’s a lot of housing going into the Upper Valley that involves large boxes, big apartment buildings,” developer Jeff Shapiro, of West Lebanon-based Occom Path Inc., said Monday. “I had this vision of wanting to bring more single-family and duplex type of housing to the marketplace.”
The project brings the number of Dartmouth-owned housing units in Lebanon to “more than 250,” college spokesperson Jana Barnello said via email Monday.
It is part of an initiative Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock introduced to “add 1,000 beds for faculty, staff and students in the next ten years,” according to the news release.
Most of the units will be for undergraduates “because some (of them) are currently residing in housing that could otherwise be utilized for graduate students, faculty, or staff,” Barnello said.
The homes will be modular houses built off-site by a company called Huntington Homes in East Montpelier, Vt. They will arrive at the Oak Ridge Road property in pieces that are then put together “like a puzzle,” as Shapiro put it, and completed with porches, garages and other details to “take it from a modular box to a home.”
This option is more “cost efficient” than other construction methods, Shapiro said, and from what he has seen the construction company builds “really solid homes.”
“If you put the average house on the back of a truck and drive 65 miles per hour down the road it’s not going to do very well,” Shapiro said.
The city Planning Board started reviewing Shapiro’s application to develop the site into rental units in 2019, the Valley News reported Shapiro, a 1983 Dartmouth graduate, said Monday that this is the only development he has worked on “of this scale,” but he has developed individual homes in the past.
After the project was approved by the Lebanon Planning Board in 2021, Shapiro said he struggled to finance the project, causing delays. There is a “trifecta of difficulty building things right now:” high construction costs, interest rates and “somewhat high” property taxes, Shapiro said.
Shapiro approached Dartmouth in the fall of 2023 about partnering on the development. Dartmouth will sublet the units as they are finished until construction is complete in fall 2026, when the college will buy the complex.
Construction of the utilities for the complex has been underway since December and the first modular home kit is expected to arrive in May, Shapiro said.
Clare Shanahan can be reached at cs [email protected] or 603-727-3216.
