MANKATO — More than five years after the School Sisters of Notre Dame announced the planned sale of their hilltop Mankato property for redevelopment, the transformation is beginning.
The next life of the main Good Counsel campus is still in the design and permitting stage, but construction of eight new affordable single-family homes for income-eligible buyers is set to start in the days ahead. A groundbreaking on the Good Counsel meadow, which sits just below the hill from the former girls boarding school and regional base of operations for the Catholic sisters, occurred Tuesday morning.
“This is just one step of many steps on this property,” said James Arentson, an architect with Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership.
SWMHP purchased a 56-acre chunk of the campus, including the historic buildings and the pastureland late last year. That sale came three years after a holding company associated with Loyola Catholic School bought the portion of Good Counsel that had previously been leased to Loyola to house the preK-12 parochial school.
The overall sale aimed to generate revenue for the aging congregation of sisters and relieve them of the financial burdens of property management. Many of the roughly 144 sisters who had been living there moved in 2022 to an assisted living facility in Shakopee, with others transitioning to other housing in the Mankato area.
In seeking a buyer, the School Sisters prioritized a future use of their land and buildings that was consistent with the organization’s mission and values. The eight homes coming to the meadow this year, with three more tentatively planned for construction in 2027, will bring new affordable housing to a community desperately in need of it.
The three- and four-bedroom, two-bath homes will be part of the Partnership Community Land Trust, creating long-term, stable homeownership opportunities for income qualified households, according to SWMHP, a nonprofit housing developer that also manages the land trust on behalf of the city of Mankato and Blue Earth County.
Jen Theneman, who is overseeing the Good Counsel project for SWMHP, noted the years of effort to accumulate various grants, tax credits and other funding required to make newly constructed housing affordable.
“Everything we do in terms of development for housing is a really long runway,” said Theneman, adding it was exciting to see the project finally take flight. “So I think this is a celebration day for our team.”
Although some in the Tourtellotte Park neighborhood lamented the meadow was being developed at all, the decision to build smaller single-family homes was a relief for others compared to some earlier proposals that would have brought multi-family apartment buildings or townhouses. The new homes were intentionally designed not just to be affordable but to be of a scale, style and spacing that matches the middle-class early-20th century neighborhood they’re joining, Arentson said.
As the homes rise in the meadow, planning and regulatory processes will continue for the evolution of the historic main campus of Good Counsel into apartments, an assisted living facility, nonprofit office space, and event space for public gatherings and performances.