TWO FORMER SAINT JOHN SCHOOLS TO BE TURNED INTO MORE THAN 100 APARTMENTS

After remaining tight-lipped for months about plans for two former Saint John school buildings, a Fredericton-based developer is now revealing details.

Erik de Jong, president of City Line Holdings, said the schools represent about a third of the roughly 340 new housing units planned for Saint John in the coming years.

City Line bought the former St. Patrick’s School, on the city’s west side, and the former St. Vincent’s High School, on Cliff Street in the shadow of St. Joseph’s Hospital, last fall.

De Jong said the plan is to continue renovations to St. Patrick’s School and transform the site into 34 apartments and seven townhouses, and the hope is to have the units ready early next year.

Because of the deteriorated state of the St. Vincent’s building, de Jong said that development will take significantly longer. And although the design work has yet to be done, he estimated between 70 and 80 units.

St. Vincent’s High School first opened in 1919 as a boys’ school before becoming a Catholic girls’ school in 1954. It continued to operate as an all-girls school until it closed in 2002. The building has been vacant ever since.

De Jong said the two schools caught his attention when they were listed for sale within about a week of each other.

He said St. Vincent’s was in “very rough shape, and after my first walk-through of that building with my respirator on, I left with a profound sense of sadness that the building had been allowed to deteriorate like it did.”

He said he thought about it for a couple of weeks and then went for a second visit — and then a third.

Eventually, he thought “you know, I can make a project here. This could be something that’s interesting and different than just new construction in a green field site.”

De Jong said the roof has been leaking for years, creating mould and ruining a lot of the interior, including the electrical system.

“In St. Vincent’s, it’s all going to come out because it was wet for so long,” he said.

“So, the first thing with St. Vincent’s is we have to dry it out and then remediate … there’s a lot of asbestos and some lead paint that needs to come out, let alone all the mould and contaminated building materials.”

He said all of the electrical wiring has to be removed and replaced, and because the classrooms are going to be turned into units, plumbing will have to be installed in each one.

De Jong said it “could be 18 months before that project’s finished.”

Both schools have sat empty for so long, that de Jong said neighbours are happy that something’s being done with them. He said “nobody has any issues with either of those two projects.”

St. Patrick’s sat empty for almost a decade before City Line Holdings bought it last fall for $745,000, New Brunswick tax records show — 19 times what it fetched seven years earlier, the first time it was sold.

St. Patrick’s opened in 1924 as a two-storey, red brick Catholic school. The school went up to Grade 5 when the Anglophone South School District closed it in 2014 because of structural problems.

Apartment complex on Loch Lomond

City Line Holdings is also building 226 units from the ground up on Loch Lomond Road.

They’re planning four buildings with 52 units each, in addition to a number of townhouses.

The plan is to build one building at a time over the next six to nine years. De Jong said they aren’t going to be large, luxury units with a lot of amenities, although each building will have a gym and a common room.

While there won’t be any subsidized units, he said 10 to 15 per cent of the units will be considered affordable.

He said rent for the affordable units will be between $1,000 and $1,250 a month.

“We make them affordable by making them a little bit smaller than the other ones. So they would be like a one-bedroom or a one-bedroom and den, right around 750 or 800 square feet.”