Hallsville School Apartments, 275 Jewett Street, Manchester, New Hampshire

The last bell at Hallsville School rang in June 2021, 130 years after the building opened. This week the 1891 schoolhouse on Jewett Street in Manchester, N.H., started its second career. State and city officials broke ground on Hallsville School Apartments, a 36-unit historic conversion that New Hampshire contractor PROCON is building and Novo Studio Architects designed.

The city declared the school surplus in 2022 and agreed to sell it for $50,000. What it gets back is a restored landmark on the tax rolls and housing in a city that doesn’t have nearly enough of it.

Project Scope

The plan converts former classrooms into studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. Thirty-two units are income-restricted with an average at or below 60% of area median income, none above 80%, and four units carry no rent or income restrictions, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Classrooms make good apartments, and the design keeps what made them good. The roughly seven-foot windows and 14-foot ceilings stay. So do hardwood floors, original woodwork and built-in cabinets, and many units will keep their slate chalkboards. Outside, crews will restore the clock tower, repair masonry and architectural details, preserve the historic facade and pull off the old fire escapes. The development team plans to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places.

Amenities include a fitness room, community room, bike storage, laundry, on-site parking and a resident services coordinator. The 1990s gymnasium next door stays with the city and will keep hosting rec programs, pickleball and after-school activities, and the site gets new green space and pedestrian improvements.

Financing is a typical small-LIHTC stack with a few New Hampshire pieces. Rockland Trust provided $9.4 million as construction lender and upper-tier tax credit investor, RBC Wealth Management is the syndicator and Evernorth supplied predevelopment money. New Hampshire Housing awarded Affordable Housing Trust funds, and gap money came through the state’s InvestNH 2.0 program. Completion is expected in about a year.

Why It Matters

School districts across New England are closing old buildings as enrollment drops, and most of those buildings are brick, centrally located and hard to demolish politically. Hallsville shows the math can work at small scale if LIHTC equity and state gap programs line up. It also shows who tends to make it work: PROCON is both the builder and part of the ownership team, which keeps the risk and the margin inside one shop.

Thirty-six units won’t fix Manchester’s housing shortage. But there are a lot of Hallsvilles, and every one of them that becomes housing instead of a vacant lot adds up.

Project Team & Details