Courtyard housing builds on high school conversion

Since 2002, Albuquerque developer Rob Dickson has completed three phases of converting the long-vacant Albuquerque High School to housing. Now his Paradigm & Company LLC is about to start the fourth and final phase, which calls for building 54 urban courtyard dwellings from scratch, on a city block that adjoins the former school. The new units — 19 with loft (open) floorplans and 35 with traditional one-, two-, and three-bedroom floorplans — will fill a roughly 300-by-300-foot block. The housing in this phase, called BelVedere, “will be grouped horizontally and vertically to frame beautiful interior courtyards,” using a design by Greg Hartman of Hartman + Majewski Design Group and David Day of Terra Designs, Dickson says. Facing the four streets along the perimeter will be the dwellings’ stoops and front doors. Units will range from 700 to 2,050 sq. ft. and from $149,900 to $449,000. The three stages of the school conversion began with renovation of the historic Old Main and classroom buildings into 70 rental lofts, a 261-space parking structure, and 2,200 sq. ft. of street commercial space. Next came four new loft buildings containing a total of 56 residences plus 6,000 square feet of street commercial. The third phase involved converting the gym and library buildings into 54 lofts and 10,000 sq. ft. of offices. Whereas the first 180 units all had open loft floorplans, which appealed to pioneers on an iffy stretch of Central Avenue just east of downtown, “now we’ve got a group that thinks of this neighborhood as safer,” Dickson observed. “They’re more conservative. They want bedrooms. We view that as a positive. We used to appeal to about 8 of the 50-something market groups identified by Todd Zimmerman and Laurie Volk [marketing consultants]. Now we appeal to about half the groups.”