An assisted living, nursing home and independent living development is in the works for the former Ocean View Memorial Hospital site on the north end of Myrtle Beach.
The Myrtle Beach planning commission this week approved the subdivision of the property at the corner of Porcher Avenue and 79th Avenue North, where projects such as luxury condos never got off the ground.
Several projects have been proposed on the site since the hospital closed in 1978, but none have made it to construction, according to the City of Myrtle Beach planning department. The site has had several zoning changes over the years, but is now the only area where single-family, multi-family housing and medical uses are allowed.
The property needed to be subdivided so the developer, Seaside Property Development, could get the loan that would allow it to move forward with the assisted living and nursing care parts of the project, said Myrtle Beach city planner Allison Hardin.
According to the property deed, Danny Bost owns the property after buying it at a foreclosure sale last year for about $12.5 million, she said. Bost and representatives of Seaside could not be reached Friday.
In the first phase of the project, the developer plans to build 60 nursing home beds and 80 assisted living units, said Felix Pitts, a senior landscape architect and land planner with Mead & Hunt, which is working with Seaside to rezone the site and prepare the project for the engineering phase.
Seaside already has a certificate of need, which is required for projects that provide nursing care, from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, according to DHEC spokesman Adam Myrick.
The nursing home will be a two-story building connected through hallways to the five-story assisted living building, Pitts said. About 100 independent living units are planned in a future phase on the other half of the subdivided property and there will also be some supportive commercial buildings, possibly medical offices, he said.
The idea is for the development to provide graduated care for residents, Pitts said.
“It’s a lot more in keeping with the scale of the surrounding buildings,” than other proposed projects for the site, he said. “In reality could anyone really see like Rapunzel’s tower out there over looking the residential [area]?”
With the aging population and the healthcare history of the site, the project is a good fit for the property, said James Hubbard, a principal architect at Pegram Associates Inc., the project’s architect and designer.
“Even when the market was strong, second row, third row condo developments really struggled from a marketing perspective and I don’t think this site was any different really,” he said. “We’re trying to create something that when it’s complete it looks like it’s been there for a long time. We want to make it look like it fits in.”
The project should be under contract for the engineering work after the beginning of 2012, and the plans will be presented to the city’s Community Appearance Board for approval as soon as the developer gives the go ahead, Pitts said. If plans fall in line and the financing is approved, construction could start in the fall, Pitts said.
Hardin said she was optimistic that this time the project will work because there is a significant need for assisted living and nursing care in the area.
The last proposed project was the Riviera, a condo project that got building permits in 2008 but was never built, possibly because of the $71 million price tag on construction costs, she said.
“It comes back to what the need is,” Hardin said. “It’s overdue. We’re overdue for another facility of this type in the city limits.”
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