Developer starts work on one of four potential Main Street duplexes
The cranberry shed at 477 Main St. will remain while construction starts on a new house nearby. Photo by Christian Uva
The cranberry shed at 477 Main St. will remain while construction starts on a new house nearby. Photo by Christian Uva
Four new duplexes along Main Street could be on the market in the near future.
Construction on a two-family home proposed by local developer and Zoning Board Chair Nazih Elkallassi started on Friday, Oct. 9.
Elkallassi said that the first house at 483 Main St. would be completed by March or April 2027.
He said that three more homes could be built based on the market demand for housing.
In advance of this, construction crews have cleared part of the lots of trees, which Elkallassi said he has faced pushback for online.
The cranberry shed at 477 Main St. will remain for now. Elkallassi said there are no plans for the building yet.
He said that the double-decker houses, which would each sit on a half-acre lot, would be good starter homes, each with a farmer’s porch.
The development process would be “very simple, by the book,” he said.
Elkallassi previously developed four two-family houses at 434 Main St., which sit a short distance from the construction site.
He filed separate project notices for the four duplexes, which would sit at 477, 479, 481 and 483 Main St., with the Conservation Commission in August. All four buildings would sit within the 100-foot buffer zone of a nearby wetland, but they would all give more than the 30 feet of required distance from the wetland edge. The commission approved the projects in September.
“The Conservation Commission is tough, so to approve it means they liked it,” Elkallassi said.
Alcoholics Anonymous members at Trinity Christian Church, which sits across the street from the lots, used the site for parking. Elkallassi said that some members were upset that they couldn’t park there anymore.
“I don’t care for the AA people,” he said. “They’ve been parking there for 30 years for a dollar a year. They didn’t even say thank you for using the parking lot for one dollar.”
Two Alcoholics Anonymous members at the church on Friday, Oct. 9 said that there haven’t been many complaints about the lack of parking. One said that some were annoyed that the lot was blocked off for eight months before construction started, but that it wasn’t too inconvenient.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said.
