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Affordable housing best use for old hospital

As the community awaits the opening of UP Health System’s new hospital along Baraga Avenue in Marquette, city officials and the health care company’s leadership have been tight-lipped about what will happen to the enormous, soon-to-be vacant building.

No one at City Hall or the hospital is uttering a whisper of any concrete direction. What we know for sure is that city leaders want the property on the tax rolls, and that Marquette cannot have a giant empty building slowly crumbling into disrepair.

With regard to zoning, the Marquette Planning Commission took the direction of supporting general residential use for the property surrounding the existing hospital, which is mostly parking lots now. More or less, that move sets up that property for redevelopment as single-family homes. Meanwhile, the central hospital complex is recommended to be mixed-use, meaning both residential and commercial enterprises could be established there.

Should that property become residential units, we’d urge officials to look strongly at how they might encourage low- to moderate-income level housing. There is still a need for these types of homes in Marquette, as a majority of the residences recently built here have been upscale.

If the hospital property is to be developed as multifamily residences, then these must be affordable. With the hospital’s close proximity to Northern Michigan University, an attractive option might be more off-campus housing for students.

We don’t know whether UP Health System will retain a portion of the hospital for its own use, as was hinted at years back, or whether the structure would be razed entirely and turned into a park for the city to inherit, which was a discussion had even longer ago.

Perhaps developers will find creative ways to repurpose the structure through the use of brownfield funds, tax breaks and other financial incentives, much like the orphanage’s transformation into the Grandview Marquette. Maybe some major tech company will see potential in the building, and invest money to furnish it appropriately, thereby creating a new business and dozens of jobs to go with it.

It’s a nice thought, but for now, it appears hospital and city leaders have no clue what will happen — or maybe the community is still deliberately being left in the dark.

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