“I was basically raised by this community, and I wanted to give back.”

That’s how local real estate professional Josh Haselton explains his motivation to bring more mid-price-range options to Grand Traverse County’s lopsided housing market. Haselton is the owner and principal broker for Northern Den Realty. He’s also a licensed builder with a background in the skilled trades, and after years of watching his clients struggle to find housing to fit their budgets, he’s ready to take matters into his own hands and start building them on his own.

Haselton is aiming to bring 11 new duplex condo structures (22 housing units total) to a vacant 6.6-acre parcel in Garfield Township. The proposed site is located off of Garfield Road, right across the street from the Traverse City Bulldog Athletic Association facility. The project, dubbed “Thrive TC,” revolves around a mission “to provide quality housing that offers more community amenity and value-add potential than any comparable new construction development in our area at a price that the average local can afford.”

“I know from being a buyer's agent in our community for the last 5-10 years that it’s been a crazy competitive marketplace for everyone,” Haselton says. “But the people that I saw struggling most to find homes are the people who have a family and they’re earning $80,000 to $100,000 in household income. Maybe 5-10 years ago with a $100,000 household, you would be able to find something to buy and have a suitable size for your family, and have a good life. But with housing demand, and interest rates, and everything that’s happening in the banking industry, it's making it harder and harder for people to afford homes, especially if they want to live closer to town.”

Repeatedly, Haselton says, he would find himself working with clients whose budgets left them with a dilemma: Buy a house that is too small for their needs, or expand their search to include areas farther and farther from Traverse City. Thrive TC is his attempt to offer a third option: Reasonably-sized, reasonably-priced family homes that are only a few minutes from town.

All 22 units planned for Thrive TC would have 1,126 finished square feet of space on the first and second floors, including three bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms. Additionally, each condo would have an unfinished basement, with rough plumbing for a third bathroom and an egress window to allow for the potential of a fourth bedroom. “That goes into the value-add opportunity,” Haselton says of the basement space, noting that the option is there for buyers to finish that space and expand the livable square footage of their homes.

The goal, Haselton tells The Ticker, is to land at a $299,000 price point. With a 20 percent down payment and a 30-year fixed mortgage with a 7 percent interest rate, he says that price would work out to approximately $1,591 per month.

“It shakes out to be $265 per square foot for a new construction home, which is low comparatively to other developments going up in our area,” Haselton says. “Price-wise, it's competitive with some of the lowest-priced houses on the market right now, but it also has more value add potential, better cost per square feet, and more amenity than what you see in the marketplace currently.”

Those amenities include a full-sized pickleball court shared by members of the Thrive TC community, an on-site children’s playground, a fenced-in dog park, a nature trail encircling the property, and a neighborhood BATA bus stop.

If all goes according to plan, Haselton says that he and his team will be able to start building the first Thrive TC condos in mid-June, with those units becoming available in by September. The construction plan for the properties makes them easy to build quickly. “There’s not going to any variation in the units, so there won’t be different floor plans. It’s all the same unit. That scaled approach helps us get our cost down with our materials and also with our vendors.” Haselton is hopeful that the entire community will be built out by June 2024.

While his involvement in the real estate industry gave Haselton a front-row seat to the struggles that prospective buyers have faced in recent years, he says it was ultimately the gratitude he feels for the community that convinced him to pursue the Thrive TC vision. Growing up with his grandmother – and later, with a series of foster families – Haselton bounced from one part of the Grand Traverse Area to the next, calling many different townships and neighborhoods home along the way. “This community raised me,” he reiterates. “I was the type of kid that grew up in a number of households, and it was really the teachers, the afterschool programs, and the coaches that filled a role for me as the parental figures in my life.”

That experience informs the Thrive TC mindset, which Haselton explained thusly in a recent Northern Den Realty newsletter: “The teacher, the coach, the server, the childcare provider, trade worker, delivery driver, clerk, and the customer service representative. The truth is that these people are not ‘average.’ They are extraordinary and our community needs them. We need them to live close, we need them to love the area, and we need them to sustain healthy growth in our community.”