GREENFIELD — Officials are annexing about 71 acres onto the city’s northeast side to make way for more than 200 new homes.

The proposal comes at a time when the city has little room left in its boundaries to put new neighborhoods, leading officials to believe more annexation considerations are on the way.

Olthof Homes, based in St. John in Lake County, is pursuing the development at the northeast corner of New and Blue roads. Preliminary plans call for the subdivision, named Evergreen Estates, to have 115 single-family homes and 98 paired villas.

The city’s plan commission earlier this month unanimously approved a recommendation to the city council for rezoning the undeveloped agricultural property as residential. The council approved the annexation in January and is slated to cast its final vote on Feb. 24.

Ron Pritzke, a lawyer with Greenfield-based Pritzke & Davis representing Olthof Homes, said estimates on final closing prices for single-family homes in Evergreen Estates are $275,000 to $375,000 and up; and $210,000 to $240,000 for the paired villas.

“The paired villas will be a maintenance-free residential area,” Pritzke added.

Preliminary plans also call for a large park in the middle of the neighborhood.

Jenna Wertman, Greenfield senior planner, recommended that the plan commission support the proposal. She recalled the build-out scenarios conducted during the city comprehensive plan’s last update in 2015, which ranged from about 550 to fewer than 1,100 new homes over the following 10 years.

“Since that plan, 827 permits have been pulled for single-family homes, so we are currently experiencing what we would consider a high-build scenario,” Wertman said.

The comprehensive plan calls for reducing annexations until much of the city’s existing residential land is prepared for development.

“A lot of the remaining residential balance is actually spoken for,” Wertman said. “We’re to that stage where we are expecting to see annexation requests.”

Evergreen Estates would meet another goal of the comprehensive plan, which is to have neighborhoods with mixed housing products and densities in a single area, she also said.

Olthof Homes is currently building about 28 communities in Indiana and Illinois. One is at U.S. 40 and County Road 700W in Cumberland. The firm also has developments in Westfield, Noblesville, Brownsburg and Plainfield.
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