A Wasilla-based rental property owner wants to build 16 units on 1.3 acres of borough-owned land behind the old hospital building.
The developer, Jiaying Lu, has applied to purchase the six vacant lots, which were last appraised at $316,000.
The assembly will hold a public hearing on the land sale during its May 13 meeting at City Hall.
The planning and zoning commission on April 10 unanimously recommended approval of the sale.
Lu proposes to build four fourplexes on the property. She said she does not yet have a construction estimate for the project. “Our plans … would be probably, hopefully it would be 18 months from purchasing the land to completion.”
She has lived the past four years in Wasilla, traveling for work as a medical surgery nurse. She is currently working as a nurse in New Hampshire, she said in an interview last week.
“I worked in Wrangell for two years as a nurse and came to appreciate the community,” said Lu, 29, describing her time with the Wrangell Medical Center.
She saw that the town needs new housing, prompting her interest in building rental units. “There is a lack of updated housing in Wrangell,” she said.
“Nursing is a side job,” Lu explained. “I am a pretty ambitious person. … I am very positive.”
She said she owns multiple properties, mostly in Alaska, “some of them are income producing.”
She also owns and leases out construction equipment, including a dump truck, adding, “I just bought a new excavator.”
She said Levi Miller, who was raised in Wrangell and now lives in Wasilla, is her “significant other” and a key part of the development project. “We work good as a team.”
Miller, she said, knows the contractors and suppliers in Wrangell, and the couple hopes to use locally sourced lumber for the project. “They’re going to be built on-site,” Lu said of construction plans for the housing.
“Another motivating factor for us, I am pregnant,” she said. “It’s a good motivator to build and generate income for the kids.”
In addition to rental housing and leasing construction equipment, Lu said she owns her own business designing packaging for food products, with a couple of graphic designers working for her.
“I like to have different streams of income,” she said, adding that she takes a hands-on approach to permitting, budgeting and logistics.
Lu said she plans to come to Wrangell this summer. She is working with the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. to learn what kinds of financing for the development might be available through the state agency.
She would need a zoning amendment to build housing on the lots, according to the borough’s report for the April 10 planning and zoning commission. A zoning amendment would require a public hearing by the planning and zoning commission and also the borough assembly.
The borough had a tentative deal to sell the six lots at the appraised value last summer to Georgia real estate developer Wayne Johnson, who also wanted to buy the old hospital building to tear it down and build up to 40 high-end condominiums on the combined property.
Johnson later asked the borough to give him the six lots for free, in exchange for his promise to demolish the old hospital. He later withdrew his offers on the properties before the assembly could consider his request for the six lots at no cost.
The borough has been trying to sell the former hospital building since SEARHC moved into its new quarters in 2021.
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