CAMDEN - After six years and three aborted attempts to build the Mickle Commons Townhouses, the city hopes the combination of two savvy developers and the Camden Initiative will get the job done.
    The Camden Redevelopment Agency signed an agreement Wednesday with the Vintage/Procida Joint Venture, which plans to build 27 town houses at South 5th and Stevens Streets in the Lanning Square West neighborhood. The $2.3 million Mickle Commons project would be Camden's first large development of "market-rate" houses in decades.
    "What we have here is the marriage of two young but aggressive developers with experience and commitment to the urban areas," agency executive director Thomas Roberts II said. "What is also significant is that this is the first project to be developed under the auspices of the Camden Housing Partnership."
    The partnership is a non-profit vehicle designed to carry out the housing component of the Initiative, an ambitious effort by state, county and city government and the private sector to rebuild Camden.
    Although it evolved independently, Mickle Commons has been put under the Initiative's umbrella to ensure it gets built, Roberts said.
    Officials hope the 27 town houses will be the first of a projected 200 new units of housing the Initiative envisions for Lanning Square West in the next few years. And because its tortured history has added to the perception of Camden as an impossible place to build and sell houses at market rates, Mickle Commons has great symbolic importance, Roberts noted.
    "This is not low-income housing, but we're not trying to gentrify Camden (either). This is something in the middle," said Earl Geertgens, president of Vintage Living Inc. The respected Camden-based firm formed the partnership with the Procida, Organization, a New York City company that has won praise for building new houses in the South Bronx and other touch neighborhoods.
    "People said it was a pipe dream to get market-rate, for sale housing done" in those areas, company president William Procida said. "We have the financial backing (for Mickle Commons). We have a great local partner, and we intend to work closely with the community."
    Procida and Geertgens said the project would be built largely with private financing from Chemical Bank, but would include a $675,000 subsidy in the form of federal funds committed to the project six years ago under the now-defunct Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program.
    Although HUD plans to ‘recapture" unspent UDAG money for use in other programs, agency spokesman Jack Flynn said Thursday that Congress has yet to authorize the move. Unspent funds allocated for past projects are still available, he added.
    UDAG funds would be used to offset the $80,000 cost of constructing each town house so that the finished product can be sold for $59,900.
    At least one bank has expressed interest in providing first mortgages, Geertgens noted. Buyers would need to earn at least $21,050 annually to qualify, and would put $3,000 down and pay about $500 a month for a town house that will compare favorably to those in the suburbs.
    Mickle Commons will be marketed first to working-class city residents, or to people who work in Camden and want to live in the city, the developers said. The Lanning Square West neighborhood is near the waterfront, the central business district, and the Cooper Hospital University Medical Center complex.
    If all goes as hoped, construction of the first phase three model town houses – could be underway by late spring of 1994, according to Procida.